Preserving original woodwork in a 1928 Tudor restoration
Tudor-era oak trim, arched openings, and built-ins are worth saving. The shortcut is to rip them out. Here's the long way, and why it pays.
The Humboldt Tudor came to us with eight decades of paint on the original quarter-sawn oak trim and a homeowner who wanted to restore, not replace.
The right play is heat plates, never chemical strippers, on anything with a profile you want to keep. Strippers melt the grain and turn it gray. Heat lifts the paint film cleanly and leaves the wood ready for shellac.
Arched openings are the trickiest part of a Tudor restoration. The originals were laid up on a curved buck with thin plaster keys; modern drywall doesn't bend that way. We rebuilt three arches using bendable lath and a three-coat plaster system, matching the original radius to within 1/16 inch.
Built-ins came out in numbered sections, were refinished off site, and returned with their original cast brass hardware re-plated. The dining-room hutch alone took 40 hours of bench time.
