DAMP DRAWERS

All this rain we’ve had has made buying furniture a potentially tricky task. You may well appreciate that if wood gets damp or wet it tends to expand. On a 1930s oak cupboard, for example, tolerance to expansion is low which means that the door expands into the frame...i.e. it jams solid. The joints on chairs can expand and when you test them appear firm and strong – when they then dry out, however, all the legs fall apart – hopefully not when eating your dinner.

A few months ago we bought what I knew to be a batch of ‘damp’ furniture. Included was a chest of drawers, the bottom of which had jammed fast so I couldn’t inspect it. Well, the wood finally dried out and contracted enough to get the drawer out, this week. I say drawer – drawer front would be more accurate – there was no drawer behind it!

This is, of course, is the danger in buying furniture without fully inspecting it. We knew a dealer who bought an old bureau at auction. He was very quick to say what a bargain it was...but not so fast to mention that all the drawers had been cut out on the inside to hide a large stereo system.

If you do buy ‘damp’ furniture, do not, under any circumstances, try to dry it out too quickly – you will end up doing more damage. In fact, I should think more old furniture has been destroyed by exposure to central heating than exposure to moisture. Georgian and Victorian furniture was all built before hermetically sealed, centrally heated houses. Shrinkage, resulting in wood splits, joint popping and veneer buckling is all very common.

We recently bought an early Victorian chest in which the wood had shrunk so much on the sides that the internal frame had started to push through the front, popping the veneer up as it went. If the chest had been in a damper house, it would be in much better shape!

Of course, you could just buy all your furniture from Nest, where we’ve already checked it over and done all the hard work...

Err...anyway, not really sure where this blog was going, but I think you should check your drawers for unwanted moisture – a rule we should all live by!