Estimates

If you are willing to bring your furniture to my studio for inspection I will examine it and provide a verbal estimate (ball park only) for free. If this consultation takes more than 10 minutes, I will need to begin charging my current hourly rate.

Only the most basic or very simple repairs can be estimated accurately in just a few minutes.

There are many reasons for this:

• So much of what might be wrong with your furniture usually cannot be seen or diagnosed until the piece is taken apart.

• Most furniture I work on has been repaired multiple times and it can be very hard to see these repairs in a matter of just a few minutes.

• There are no standards for furniture repair like there are for other construction trades like plumbing and electrical, so the variety of materials and techniques used for restoration is endless.

• Because there is no regulation or certification in this trade, poor quality work is more common than good quality work.

• Also endless is the variety of furniture types, designs, materials etc. It’s rare that I ever see the same thing twice. I’d venture to say that I’ve seen more variety in my 35+ years than the same person practicing medicine or auto mechanics.

  I like to give prospective clients a good idea of what a given job will cost . . . usually within 25% of my estimate. In order to do this, I need to know how much time a given job (repair or creation of a new object) will take. Because of the unique nature of most objects I work on, I start from scratch each time to create a treatment plan. This treatment plan is no different from an outline a novelist creates or blueprints an architect makes. A treatment plan is a piece of work as important as the repair itself. If I did not charge for this time consuming process, I’d quickly go out of business.