A very front-of-mind occupation that I have as an artist is finding and paying for frames for my artwork. I’m probably like many artists - I love making art most of all, and I want my art to look it’s best, so it’s worthwhile to me to seek out the best frames possible for my art.
Even though I know that framing is a worthwhile pursuit, I still like making art most of all, so, framing can risk being a bit of a chore. Restoring frames has made the chorelike task of framing more fun for me, and it’s also very economical. Restoring frames that are scratched or damaged taps into the problem-solving aspect of my creative practice.
So very many options for framing lay scattered across the internet in various shops and channels, yet a resource I’ve come to appreciate over time is finding frames at local yard sales and estate sales.
The frames I find at yard sales are 90% wall-ready frames, yet, they’ve usually been moved into a yard or driveway or piled together with other items. They’ve been bumped or scratched.
Restoring frames that I have found at yard sales has been easy and inexpensive, but finding out the best way to do this did take me some time. The best way to repair scratches on frames is to use furniture repair sticks, like this one below:
In this example frame, you can see below some of the scratches the frame has. Most of the wood structure looks very good, yet there are small chipped or scratched areas on the frame.
The photo above is the entire frame ‘before’ my wax stick coverage of the scratches and bumps. Below is an after of a specific area:
Here is the before and after together:
Like I mentioned above, the frame in the before photo looks 90% wall-ready, all it needed was a few touchups to be truly ready for prime time.
To do what I did here, especially if you’re new to restoring frames or you’d like to spruce up some old frames and save money, I recommend buying a set of furniture repair sticks online or from your local tool/home improvement store. These are wax sticks where you can run the stick over a frame, smooth down the wax after it is applied, and voila, your frame looks like it’s brand new. Scratches are now repaired by the wax.
What I liked best was getting a set including several colors of wax sticks to make sure I could repair any frame I came across. A range of different browns, reds, and cream colors is what will have the most application.
Before finding wax sticks as a solution to fixing up frames, I went through all sorts of other ideas in my head to repair the wonderful frames I’d found for 50 cents or sometimes even free. Should I paint the frame? Refinish it somehow?
While I have run into frames that need a full repaint, it’s pretty rare. 9.5 times out of 10, wax sticks are the way to go to repair the frames that I’ve found at yard sales or estate sales.
In addition to saving money and time, this process also rescues frames from the landfill. I remember one estate sale that I went to on a Sunday afternoon, where the sale was ending soon and the seller was eager to get as many items as possible cleared off of their property - the seller gave me a box of a dozen old-timey frames for free. I fit them into my car - barely - and wasn’t sure what I would do with them all or if I could even come close to fixing them. They were such nice, wonderful frames! Some of them surely had cost over $200 when they were originally purchased. Yet all the frames had the 90% problem. They were A- or B+ frames at best. It was this experience that led me to go down a research path towards finding the wax sticks and the best way to repair the frames. Surely if I hadn’t been to the estate sale at the last minute, and if I hadn’t been so tenacious at researching frame restoration tactics, the wonderful frames would be in a landfill right now.
As far as saving money, I can conservatively estimate that the original cost of all the frames I’ve salvaged this summer is around $1000. Who knows? Unconservatively, maybe it’s more like $2000. The wax furniture repair sticks cost me $7.
Good luck in retouching any frames you may have, and I hope this blog is helpful!