They look at the pews for four seconds on the way in. They look at this for an hour.
The front of the room
Pulpit, lectern, altar, communion or sacrament table, rails and screens — the pieces everyone in the building looks at for an hour every week, and the ones nobody thinks to budget for.
Your congregation looks at the pulpit and the table in front of it — altar, communion table or sacrament table, depending on your tradition — for the entire service. They look at the pews for about four seconds on the way in.
It is the highest-visibility woodwork you own per dollar spent, and it is almost always the last thing on the list.
Why this furniture is different
A pew is joinery. A pulpit is usually carving, veneer and inlay — and it does not forgive a general contractor.
Chancel furniture is the best work in most buildings. It was commissioned rather than ordered, it is frequently a memorial gift with a name on a plate somewhere, and it often carries carving, applied ornament, book-matched veneer or inlay that simply does not exist elsewhere in the room.
All of that is exactly what gets destroyed by an aggressive strip. Veneer is thin — sometimes under a millimeter on older pieces — and one pass with the wrong abrasive goes through it into the substrate, which cannot be undone at any price. Carved detail loses its crispness the same way, a little at a time, until the piece reads as soft and nobody can say quite why.
So we work chancel furniture the opposite way round from pews: hand methods first, and the least aggressive thing that will work. Most of these pieces need cleaning, consolidation and a maintenance coat far more than they need stripping.
What we do
An honest limit: where original carving has been lost, we can reproduce it, but hand-carved replacement is real money. We will show you what it costs and what it looks like left alone, and let the committee decide.
What we work on
The highest-visibility piece in the building. Usually carved, often veneered, almost always worth restoring rather than replacing.
Takes candle wax, spilled wine, cleaning chemicals and standing water on a weekly basis. The top is generally in far worse shape than the base.
Communion rails, chancel rails, choir screens and reredos. Priced per foot, and the kneeling pads on a communion rail are upholstery work we do in the same visit.
Also: clergy chairs and sedilia, credence tables, baptismal font surrounds, organ and choir stall casework, processional cross and banner stands, and the flower stands nobody can ever find a match 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 |
|---|---|
| Pulpit or lecternFull refinish, hand work on carved detail. | $900–2,600 |
| Altar, communion or sacrament tableTop and base. Wax and stain damage is normal. | $1,100–3,400 |
| Communion or chancel railPer linear foot, refinished in place. | $55–140 |
| Rail kneeling padsRecovered and re-foamed, per linear foot. | $18–38 |
| Choir screen or reredosQuoted per piece. Carving drives the number. | $1,400–9,000 |
| Clergy chairsPer chair, wood and upholstery. | $340–1,100 |
| Veneer repairLifting or blistered veneer re-laid, per area. | $180–850 |
| Carved detail reproductionHand carved to match. Quoted after inspection. | From $450 |
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, and it is the reason this is hand work. Carved detail is stripped with solvent and picked out by hand rather than sanded, because a sanding block rounds over every arris it touches. The difference is invisible on day one and obvious in a photograph ten years apart.
Almost always. Lifting veneer gets re-glued and clamped back down — the trick is getting adhesive underneath without breaking the piece off, which is a matter of patience rather than skill. What is not repairable is veneer that has been filled with putty by a previous well-meaning repair, and even then we can usually lift the fill and patch in matching veneer.
If you want it to. Often the pulpit was deliberately a different, better wood than the pews — walnut against oak is common — and matching them flattens something the original builders intended. We will show you both options on a test patch and let you choose.
Photographed in place, removed, kept together in a labeled box, cleaned, and refitted in the same holes. We treat this as the most important non-negotiable part of the job, because a lost memorial plate is not a finish problem, it is a phone call to a family.
Yes. Chancel furniture is movable, so it goes out on a Monday and comes back before the weekend, or gets worked in place behind screens if it cannot be moved. Communion rails are done in sections the same way pews are.
Restore, nearly always. New chancel furniture of comparable quality is commissioned work at $8,000 to $40,000 a set, and what you have was probably a memorial gift. The restoration is usually a fraction of that, and it keeps the name on the plate meaningful.
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.
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