Furniture Physicians Company

04/04/2026

Well, we finally pulled out of most of winter, right? Now the sunlight is flooding into peoples homes and our phone is ringing off the hook... I believe since people were stuck in their homes with the kids, pets, etc., it seems the furniture has taken quite the beating... Our feature this week for a short video is about Mid Century Modern Maple... take a look... this is a quite typical dinette set that you would find in the "breakfast nook" area of an eat in kitchen....

So sometimes people will refer to this as the "Leave it to Beaver" generation pieces. Maples as seen in smaller dinette sets like this appeared in many "eat...

02/07/2026

Oh, we have something unusual and entertaining this week! It's a Polyphonic Music Machine or sometimes also called a Polyphonic Music Box. So these pieces are so much fun as you get to see the forunner of the later Edison style cylinders and discs. These are based on a clock sprung style mechanism with tiny rectangular holes punched in the large metal music discs. As a battery of individual metal keys "pluck" the holes the attached sounding plate amplifies the individual tones. This unit here once belonged to the Mayor of Allentown, Pennsylvania back in the early 1900s which was not unusual as these large models were only in the hands of the wealthy at the time. Although made in Germany and sold in many countries the Regina Company wanted to be more profitable by avoiding import tarriffs here in the US (hmmmm... sounds familiar) so they moved their manufacturing here. This unit suffered from heavy home smoke smells. We took it all apart, cleaned it severa times, and sealed it up with special flake shellac that I make for application inside and out... We also added some additional historically correct coating over that... If you got a little time wait for the end of the video and listen to this beautiful piece...

So the old music boxes grew up in the 1870s with the invention of the Polyphonic Music Machine or Music Box. These could be as small as table top models with...

01/13/2026

This weeks featured piece.... a white quarter sawn oak Mission style desk... So if you have always like older more solid furniture but most antique furnitue was just too fancy for you maybe you should look at the Mission Oak movement of the early 1900s. This beautiful Tiger Oak flake wood looks right at home in the modern household with it's simple straight lines.

So in the turn of the century early 1900s we see the simplicity of craft made or what is referred to as Mission Oak. The desk you see here has graining patt...

12/19/2025

So what's new? Well, we really put my Granddaughter, Sierra, to the test recently. This was what is called a Scholar's Table from the Quing Dynasty which was the last of the Chinese dynasties from 1644 to 1912. We think this was probabaly from the 1800 but that is at most an educated guess by me based on construction and materials. What a mess! This piece was completely crushed. Take a look, this is fun....

12/13/2025

So I thought I'd share an interesting "craft piece" that was severely damaged in a move. So this was just "one" of those moves where everything kind of went in the wrong direction. This was a treasured hand built piece for some obvious Steelers fans. Piece was picked up by moving crews who carefully packed BUT the piece went into storage for a period..... Well, take Texas heat combined with movers quilts and other heavy objects on top of it and you get this.... Melted in quilted movers pads.... I mean this was BAD. It was an extremely heavy piece and the customer did not want to have it MOVED out again for service.... what to do... So in my car hobby for the last 10 years I've been doing accessory vinyl wrapping and graphics. I told the customer about my experience with premium grade vinyls and I thought that was the best way to "save" this top.... so we sanded the messy top level and then about a half hour later Sierra and I turned out this....

11/26/2025

A question I get asked quite often is... Can you do larger or more complicated pieces of furniture in your satin black or satin white finishes? Well, sure! So this week we have a large traditional hutch which falls under that mid century modern description we see so much of now. This is a 2 piece unit (top and bottom). If you are moving these pieces even just around the house I would suggest using those moving sliders you can buy just about anywhere. If there are steel connectors on the back connecting top to bottom you should be safe to just "slide" the whole thing by grabbing the bottom case. IF you do not have those connected you will probably need 3 people to take the top down and slide each piece separately.
A safety tip- We address the lighting system that came from the factory in these pieces.... In furniture retailing they eventually got a nickname... The Firestarter Kit.... Take 3 hot transformers turned on by an open spark and put it up in the top of furniture case goods with NO ventilation. We recommend throwing these units away... If you still want interior lighting you can buy battery powered under counter light bars that work great up there and generate NO heat... So, on with the video!....

So we have developed somewhat of a reputation/following for our black satin and white satin furniture finishes. These coatings are heavily modified furnitur...

11/18/2025

The holidays are coming!

Get your home ready for family and friends.
Have a chair that needs repair, a wobbly table, white rings on the guest room dresser?
Let Furniture Physicians help!
HOLIDAY REPAIR SPECIAL
All structural repairs 20% off
Special pricing on in-home repairs.
Fast service so you can cross this off your list!
Call Annette at 614-774-4638
Hurry! Special Expires December 25, 2025

10/19/2025

Every now and then we get in "craft" furniture which could come from Africa, South or Central America, or in this case Hawaii. So crafts pieces, especially those made of exotic tropical woods require some special handling and well, they sometimes have some rather "unusual" coatings on them... So welcome our current contestant here which is not only exotic Monkey Pod Wood but it was finished in surf board clear gel coat (polyester). You are looking at 30 hours of stripper exposure on this to cut through about 1/4th inch of that coating which was failing with "window pane" style fracturing all over the top.... So whew! What a bunch of work..... This is about 6 minutes of video....

Every now and then we get in "craft" furniture which could come from Africa, South or Central America, or in this case Hawaii. So crafts pieces, especially ...

09/27/2025

So just a video short this week about probably one of the most misunderstood damages we see on furniture around here... The dreaded "ring" and more importantly in this video the black ring. So the Witch in the play Mac Beth said, "By the pricking of my thumb, something wicked this way comes." Well, I say, "Water thy plants on thy furniture and the black rings will surely come." Seriously, if you are going to have ANY type of plant on ANY furniture have a waterproof tray under it. Notice I said TRAY. That tray should be capable of catching ANY water that comes even from overwatering. A simple flat mat won't get it done unless you want a mat mark rather than a ring!
So what is the difference between a white or light colored ring and a dark ring? White or light colored rings are almost always just in the coating itself. This happens because of excess heat or cold presented to solvent based coating (a lacquer or hybridized lacquer usually) making the powdered soaps (zinc stearate usually) in that coating "show" out of solution. With a cold glass moisture gets stuck in the outside of the coating showing that soap. With heat the wood itself gets hot enough to render moisture batting up against the coating from the inside. Again, there are fairly easy ways to either remove or dissolve those types of rings. Today's subject is the black ring which is big trouble since you are damaging and affecting the wood cellular structure. This is a short video, still worth a look!

So we are addressing the dreaded "black ring" on woods. Almost everyone has heard about white rings and there are a lot of home remedies as well as professi...

09/21/2025

So what have we been working on lately.... well, among other things.... this post Civil War Washstand. Again, we have a piece here that was in what I would call a fairly mild fire. Smoke had baked/charred the varnish over it but not gotten into the wood. There are few finished pictures here with this post and the video of the transformation of this piece. Because of all that smoke I thought we might be working with an ash piece here but it did turn out to be some awesome highly figured walnut. Ohh and... I should clarify a point of argument/contention about who was making what after the Civil War..... As I mentioned in the video guns/ammo plants were converting to furniture manufacturing. That is not exactly true. Further research shows that.... The fi****ms industry in the mid-19th century helped develop a new manufacturing method using machine tools to create interchangeable parts. Some of the skilled machinists who worked for gun companies, such as Francis A. Pratt and Amos Whitney, went on to establish companies that produced machine tools for a variety of industries, including furniture makers. This is likely the origin of "guns and ammo plants making furniture", as some of the machinery used in furniture factories came from the former arms manufacturing centers.
No matter what, this early repeatable manufacturing improvement made for some beautiful furniture. Just imagine this piece with a water pitcher and bowl ready for use in the home! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G9vPpsFV3Gs

09/15/2025

So a very popular piece for restoration is the cedar chest... In past years I've had as many as 5 chest in the shop in a single week! Most people kind of assume the cedar chest is an invention of the 20th century because the Lane Furniture Manufacturing spent many millions of dollars cornering the market on cedar chest. Actually cedar chests just weren't referred to as cedar chest but generally just blanket and storage chest with those even dating back to ancient Mesopatamia about 3700 year ago.... So back to Lane.... The Lane cedar chest originated in 1912 when E.H. Lane purchased a box company, incorporating it as the Standard Red Cedar Chest Company, and began producing chests as a "hope chest" for brides, later becoming The Lane Company. The company became famous for its "Girl Graduate Plan", which gifted miniature chests to graduating girls to promote the brand. Starting in the 1920s and continuing for decades, Lane sent miniature cedar chests to high school girls as a promotional gift. This was a highly successful marketing strategy that introduced millions of girls to the brand. So as we look at this video we are going to "decode" what the serial numbers mean either on the bottom of the chest or sometines on the inside lid. Please note that Lane only started this coding AFTER 1936.... so no code means you have one of the older cedar chest models. To read a Lane cedar chest serial number, find the number, usually on the bottom of the chest or inside the lid, then read it backward from right to left. The first two digits represent the month, the next two digits are the day, and the final two digits are the year. If there is a seven-digit serial number, the leftmost digit is the plant number. So on with the Lane Cedar Chest 101 Tech. video....

So from the early 1900s we have the Lane Cedar Chest. If you see serial numbers anywhere on your chest did you know you can decode those numbers to find out...