Cleaning Smoke Damaged Furniture

My man Jim, my jack of all trades assistant, has just received his honorary 'doctorate' from the 'Dorset Custom Furniture School of Restoration' for his recent work in mitigating smoke damage to a large and diverse group of objects, from elephant spears to light fixtures to 18th century painted blanket chests. I met with the clients last Friday and we reviewed the work he had done on their stuff in July and August. They will not be back in their home, which was damaged in a linseed oil fire, until the spring but they are thrilled with the progress he is making. We still have quite a few items left to restore, but Friday he rewired and fitted the paper replacement parts and new bulbs to some of their beautiful Danish chandeliers that they had actually considered, for a moment, to be a total loss. Anyway, the rewiring presented me with a great image as I was leaving for the day. Click the pictures to enlarge them ...

Looking through the finish room door with the chandeliers temporarily plugged in and hung from the ceiling ...

Before

After

Chairs before and after .. we will have to renew the French polish as there is no way we know of to clean the smoke from shellac without also removing the shellac ... Anybody out there know??? We have two fourposter shellaced beds to clean ....

Jim is also now working on other desmoking jobs like this fireplace surround in the house restoration project we're working on ...

After some thought, I have decided not to post our cleaning methods here as, while they work for us, and after some considerable trial and error, Jim knows the right approach and the appropriate precautions for each type of object, I'm not sure we should just stick them up here and laet you have at it. If you would like to contact us regarding what we have learned for your own use, leave a comment below, or email or call me through my website and I would be happy to share what we have learned along with our many precautions and disclaimers ...

Linseed Oil .... A Cautionary Tale

Linseed oil can create a beautiful finish on fine furniture and metal work. It's an easily renewable finish, a natural product in some of it's forms. I use it to refresh my wood counters and the finish on some of my earlier oil finished pieces in my home. The counter you see above is now in the 'once a year for the rest of your life ' phase of the finish process, is used hard daily and looks terrific with little care. That little pile of rags in the foreground though could completely wipe out my house or yours if you weren't paying attention. Tragically, it happened to a friend/client a few weeks ago. They came by yesterday and now that they have seen that some of their furniture will be coming back, I think it's ok to publish this cautionary tale. Wikipedia says: Linseed oil is extracted from ripe flax seeds by cold pressing. It has natural characteristics that make it an excellent product to produce a beautiful and durable finish on wood products. It does, however, have a potential downside as Wikipedia points out in the second sentence of the description .... 'Linseed oil can polymerize and the reaction is exothermic, and rags soaked in it can ignite spontaneously.' True enough. Only the prompt and professional response of the Dorset Fire Department and other mutual aid companies prevented the building from being a total loss. So, I now have, in the upstairs of my garage, a large selection of smoke damaged furniture and we are currently working through the cleaning and polishing of some of the pieces. It's a sobering but rewarding process. DISPOSE OF YOUR RAGS PROPERLY !!!

The library before. We built the table back in 2004 ...

The table after the fire ... It was covered with papers and since the room didn't actually burn, the papers protected the finish somewhat. There are still 'ghosts' of the objects that were on the table left and we are probably going to strip the top and refinish it. The base is fine and looks great now.

One of the chairs below had been in for a tune up in March ... They are truly amazing pieces ..

One of these we 'fixed up' back in March ...

This is a 'before' picture from my previous blog post ...They are pretty toasted now but I think they'll be OK if we're careful and lucky.

This piece was one of the furthest in the house from the start of the fire in the garage, but it was still pretty heavily smoke damaged .... The smoke gets into every crack and crevice ...

But we got it. Shellac and Butchers Wax are your friends after it's clean .. The chair in the foreground is from the library and it got slightly overcleaned as the original finish had black at the intersections of the spindles, legs and seats and until we looked closely at the photos of the library before the fire we couldn't understand why we couldn't get that 'smoke' off. We'll continue to work on the pieces ... There are several important ones yet to go .... When we have a definitive cleaning process, I'll post it here ... We've got , obviously, a couple things that work, but we're still refining our techniques.
'Dispose of oily rags properly' is an understatement. 'Do not operate heavy equipment under the influence of drugs or alcohol' .... same deal ... Be careful ....