Furniture repairs Cape Town

Solid wood and good-quality veneered pieces are almost always worth repairing: tables, chairs, chests of drawers, headboards and cabinets. Flat-pack chipboard furniture can be repaired too, but once the board has crumbled around a fixing the fix is often short-lived.

For solid timber, repair is usually far cheaper than replacing with something of the same quality. A loose joint, split leg or broken drawer runner is typically a one- to two-hour job. Replacement makes more sense for cheap board furniture with multiple failures.

Simple repairs such as re-gluing a chair joint or replacing a drawer runner range from about R350 to R900 in Cape Town. Structural repairs to tables or cabinets, or work that needs matching timber, sit higher and are quoted on inspection.

Yes, if the joint is taken apart, cleaned of old glue and re-glued with the right adhesive and clamping pressure. Simply squirting glue into a gap or adding screws tends to fail again within months.

A good carpenter matches timber, fills and colour-blends so most repairs are hard to spot. Deep gouges or replaced parts on a highly figured surface may show slightly, which the pro should point out before starting.