Everything else made of wood
Wainscoting, casings, handrails, window sash, balcony fronts and organ casework — matched, milled and refinished to the original profile.
Millwork is the wood nobody notices until it is done, and then the whole room looks different and nobody can say why.
It is also the cheapest square footage in the building to bring back, because most of it needs cleaning and a coat rather than anything structural.
Where millwork actually fails
It is never the whole run. It is four feet by the radiator and eighteen inches at the bottom of the stair.
Interior millwork in a heated building is remarkably durable. What kills it is local and predictable: heat from radiators and registers, which dries and checks the wood immediately around them; water at the base of exterior walls; hands on handrails and corners; and sixty years of cleaning product on the lower three feet of everything.
That means a whole-room millwork job is usually the wrong purchase. Spot repair the damaged runs, clean and recoat the rest, and you get 90% of the result for a third of the money. We will tell you which runs actually need replacing and which just need washing, and the second list is always longer than churches expect.
The part that takes skill is matching. Old profiles were run on knives that no longer exist, so a stock molding from a lumberyard will be close and wrong. We grind knives to match your original profile and run new stock on it, so a patched run reads continuous instead of nearly continuous.
What we do
An honest limit: if your building has settled significantly, casings and wainscot will no longer be square to the openings. We can make it look right. We cannot make it measure right without addressing the settling, which is a different contractor.
What we work on
The largest wood surface in most sanctuaries and the one most damaged by cleaning product. Usually needs degreasing far more than it needs refinishing.
Door and window casings, crown, chair rail, plinth blocks. Matched to the original profile with ground knives.
Window sash repaired rather than replaced. Handrails made safe and refinished. Balcony and gallery fronts, stair stringers, newels.
Also: organ casework and choir stalls, confessionals, narthex and vestibule paneling, coat-room and closet millwork, bulletin and hymn boards, columns and pilasters, and the odd built-in nobody has a drawing for.
Published pricing
Quoted per item rather than per foot. These are real ranges from real work, not a starting-at number designed to get us in the door.
| Work | Typical |
|---|---|
| Wainscoting and panelingDegrease, repair, refinish. Per linear foot. | $28–75 |
| Casings and trimPer linear foot, in place. | $18–48 |
| Custom knife and milled stockProfile matched and run. Per profile, plus footage. | $280–700 |
| HandrailMade safe, refinished. Per linear foot. | $26–68 |
| Newel postRepaired and refinished, per post. | $180–650 |
| Window sashRepaired, reglazed, refinished. Per sash. | $340–1,200 |
| Balcony or gallery frontPer linear foot. | $40–110 |
| Organ caseworkQuoted after inspection. | From $1,800 |
Done in the same visit as pew work, all of this costs materially less — one mobilization instead of two. Every price on one page.
Questions we get asked
Yes. We grind a knife to your original profile and run new stock on it. Old millwork was cut on knives that no longer exist, so anything off a lumberyard shelf will be close and visibly wrong — and close is worse than obviously different, because the eye catches it without knowing why.
Almost never, and we will argue against it. Millwork fails locally — by the radiator, at the bottom of the stair, along the base of an exterior wall. Spot repair those, clean and recoat everything else, and you get nearly the whole result for a third of the cost.
Repair, in a historic building. A hundred-year-old sash in old-growth wood, properly maintained, outlasts a modern replacement unit by decades and can be repaired indefinitely. A failed modern unit is a landfill item. Repair also keeps the glass, and old glass is part of how a sanctuary looks.
Decades of cleaning product and furniture polish, usually silicone-based, built up on top of the finish. It is not finish failure and it does not need refinishing — it needs degreasing. That is a far cheaper job and it is the single most common thing we get called about and then talk churches out of.
Yes, in sections, the same as everything else. Millwork is the easiest work to phase because no part of it takes the room out of use.
We repair and refinish existing rails and can add code-compliant graspable rails where there are none. Where a project needs formal ADA sign-off we work alongside your architect rather than certifying it ourselves.
They do pews and stop. When the doors and the chancel furniture need work too, most churches end up hiring a second contractor who has never worked in a sanctuary. We do the whole room in one mobilization.
Related work