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" What are the big dangers to watch out for? What are the main reasons furniture ends up here? Dry air\u2014wood shrinks, cracks, and splinters when it dries. It&amp;#039;s most vulnerable when it&amp;#039;s just been moved from a wet climate to a dry one. We&amp;#039;ve had clients call and tell us that their table that just arrived has imploded. Direct sunlight\u2014you&amp;#039;d be amazed how quickly dark wood will fade in the sun, or how wood will split from the heat of the sun. What else: movers, vacuum cleaners, dust rags that catch on little bits of loose veneer, people who lean back on two legs of their chairs, kids who bounce on the sofas or leave food on the wood. Some kinds of food, like ice cream, will actually eat through the polish. So will alcoholic beverages. People who think they know how to do repair work, they drive us crazy. They make mistakes that are harder to correct than the original problem. And then of course there&amp;#039;s fire and water\u2014that kind of damage can be fascinating to repair. What are some of the really tragic cases you&amp;#039;ve seen? We&amp;#039;ve had an 18th-century American cherry corner cabinet whose top had burned away. We conserved as much as we could of whatever was left and re\u2011created everything that was gone. Right now we&amp;#039;re working on a Ruhlmann chiffonier. We think a restorer at some point got lazy and sprayed it with lacquer\u2014the grain was raised and visible, but those Art Deco finishes are supposed to be so clean, perfect, and polished. We have an 18th-century English library chair that came here as a bagful of fragments of mahogany. We&amp;#039;ve rebuilt the arms and put in the right kind of corner blocks and rejointed everything. We also use a lot of reversible glues, because we try to think about the next restorers who&amp;#039;ll come along. How can an owner protect their stuff? I mean, if you don&amp;#039;t want to put up velvet ropes, what are the best defenses? You should keep the humidity around 40 or 45 percent. You can buy a cheap humidity sensor at any hardware store. Put cushions on your cane chairs to spread the load\u2014don&amp;#039;t sit directly on cane. Keep your shades pulled down when you&amp;#039;re not home. Don&amp;#039;t use silicone dusting sprays on antiques\u2014they make the surface very greasy. Just wax the wood once a year with a hard-paste wax like Staples or Butcher&amp;#039;s. It&amp;#039;ll hide the scratches, and eventually the wax layers will build up and water will bead on them. But don&amp;#039;t use a tinted wax anywhere that it can stain anything\u2014it shouldn&amp;#039;t touch the carpets, wallpaper, curtains, or people&amp;#039;s clothes. And you shouldn&amp;#039;t wax American furniture at all. Collectors want untouched, crusty old surfaces, which are very delicate. I wish there were more easy answers I could give like that. But I can&amp;#039;t recommend to people the shellacs, stains, pigments, and powders we use\u2014they react differently on every different kind of wood. Our shop started out almost 30 years ago as the in-house restoration shop for Sotheby&amp;#039;s. I&amp;#039;ve had 19 years of job experience and took years of college courses in cabinetmaking and restoration. We know how to make aesthetic and technical judgments with the chemicals at every step. Are most of your tools antiques? I have my father&amp;#039;s 70-year-old jack plane and a late-19th-century Norris plane, and almost all the screwdrivers, chisels, and saws here are old. The old steel is so much stronger than the new, and it holds an edge longer. We also have an 18th-century bed-bolt wrench to take apart and put together four-posters.  You have old materials around for patching, too? We have boxes of super-old veneers, which are thicker than anything you can get today. We have stacks of spare table leaves with wonderful old surfaces\u2014once I even matched a leaf that was sitting here to a table that came in. The leaf happened to be the same size, age, and wood and almost the same color as the table. In every repair, we try to put in as much old surface as possible. We have a good collection of mirrors with mercury backings; the mercury rubs off on you if you&amp;#039;re not very, very careful. And there are drawers here full of old locks, keys, hinges, pulls, casters, escutcheons, screws, and nails, cannibalized from furniture that was beyond economical repair. When we find 18th- and 19th-century nails and screws, we pull them out to straighten and reuse. Do you work on just museum-quality pieces, or can anyone send you something they love? We have clients all over the U.S. with multimillion-dollar collections\u2014some of them are celebrities you&amp;#039;ve heard of. We make house calls once or twice a year, or whenever we&amp;#039;re needed. But anyone can send us something, or pull up in our driveway to drop it off. We just got a chandelier in from Florida, and two tortoiseshell tea caddies from San Francisco. People can also send us photos and we&amp;#039;ll give rough estimates. Most of the time a job takes four to six weeks, but we can rush it if someone can&amp;#039;t live without that piece of furniture. We charge $125 an hour, and it&amp;#039;s our responsibility to let people know when the repairs would cost more than the value of the piece. Lacquer and tortoiseshell are very time-consuming to fix, they have to be ironed and steamed and softened. They&amp;#039;re not very hot on the market now, and not necessarily worth the effort. Or if someone comes to us with a table that has great patination but a few rings or dents, and they ask us to sand it to look like new\u2014well, we&amp;#039;d refuse, or convince them to change their mind, and just give it the lightest cleaning instead. Stair Restoration, 33 Maple Avenue, Claverack, NY 12513; 518\u2011851\u20112201; www.stairrestoration.com "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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