Restoring Heirlooms

Chances are your favorite possessions are those that evoke memories of a beloved person, place or event, and now rest proudly on your mantle or end table. What do you do when the kids or the dog knock the treasured heirloom off its perch? Wiebold Studios is a Cincinnati, Ohio company that specializes in solving exactly this sort of problem. In this article, Wiebold Studios Conservator Jennifer Burt answers frequently asked questions about her company’s work.

What is the difference between repair, restoration and conservation?

Repair is simply putting something broken back together. The damaged areas will be visible, but all the pieces will be back in their proper places. We frequently do this sort of work on objects with great sentimental value and little monetary worth.

Restoration is defined as returning the item to its original condition; however, sometimes a better choice is returning an object to its aged condition. The best approach really depends on the object and its owners expectations for it.

Conservation is about preserving and protecting, but not necessarily changing the appearance. For example, a collector who drops a piece of rare and valuable porcelain might require a full restoration. The piece would be returned to its original condition without any evidence of the damage. If that same broken piece were purchased by a museum because it was such a fine example of its type, they would require conservation. The piece would be cleaned, and an acid free tack would be used that was just enough to hold it together for display purposes.

How do you determine whether a piece is worth restoring, and how does restoration affect value?

We have no company criteria used to make this decision. We don’t appraise antiques or research value. The reason for this is that the dollar value of the piece has no bearing on the cost of the restoration work. It takes the same amount of time and energy to restore a $10 Kmart vase as a $10,000 Meissen vase. Sometimes our customers find this frustrating, but we urge them to do their own research either with an appraiser or on-line. We restore plaster of Paris casts of children’s hands made in kindergarten as frequently as high priced pottery. Much of our work is done for sentimental reasons, not for investment purposes, although we do that, too. As far as the value of a piece after restoration, again, it depends on the piece. A silver candlestick you can use is worth more than a broken one, but we find that for most of our customers, if the broken candlestick used to belong to Grannie, than the monetary value is less important than the sentimental value. Still, to answer the question of value, I would say that a restored piece might be worth approximately 60% of the value of a piece in original condition.

-by p4A Contributing Editor Susan Cramer.

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