Artistic Wood Crafts

Description of Work: Artistic Wood Crafts did cornice repair on the side of our house.

Description of Work: They built a custom cabinet and custom doors for a laundry closet.

Description of Work: I had Artistic Wood Crafts come out and give me a quote for a door, a week ago. I have a very small entry door. So, I wanted them to make a custom door for me.

Description of Work: We had built-in shelving made for either side of our fireplace, including bookshelves, cabinets, and a space for a flat screen TV. The project also included taking a pre-existing wood shelf, cutting it down to fit the new space, painting it and re-installing it.

Description of Work: Restoration of the set of two side-by-side, windowed front entry doors (parlor floor) of our 1885 Brooklyn townhouse. The above price does not include the cost of new lock sets, cylinder, and a new mail slot, which were purchased separately. The wooden portions of the doors were weatherbeaten and deeply scratched, gouged, missing pieces of molding, and otherwise in disrepair due to age and chronic lack of maintenance. Also, the doorknob kept falling off and could no longer be securely reattached. Following an Internet search for sources of door restoration work for brownstone buildings, and finding positive comments concerning the work of Artistic Wood Crafts, we e-mailed, and then called them. Omar Oulouah and his partner, Belda Abdellah, responded promptly to our telephone inquiry and, after visiting to assess the doors, offered two options: (1) Apply a 1/4” facing to the doors (using the same wood as the original—sugar pine), building out the interior frame to match the added thickness of the doors. Omar and Abdellah felt that to simply sand or replace the damaged sections would result in a patchwork appearance, whereas the facing would look like the original door, fully restored. (2) Replace the doors with newly built replicas of sugar pine, as in the existing doors, or a wood of our choice. It was estimated that option 2, creating new doors, would cost a few thousand dollars more than repair of the originals, which, in any case we preferred to keep, so we chose the first option. After starting work on the doors, Omar and Abdellah realized that portions of the interior faces of the doors had suffered sufficient damage that their condition would be best addressed with application of a similar 1/4” sugar pine veneer as that proposed for the exterior, and we agreed. The result is that the old doors became virtually encased (or “entombed”) within a covering of new wood. In addition, Artistic Wood Crafts created new moldings; cleaned and polished the original, embossed hinges; polished the doors’ exterior kick plates to a like-new finish; fashioned an additional layer of molding for the interior door frame, to accommodate the new, extra thickness of the doors; attached weatherstrip sweeps to the door bottoms; refinished the top metal door bolt, mounted on the inside edge of the stationary door, and replaced the modern, bottom bolt with a vintage match; installed new lock sets and an oversized [“magazine-sized”] mail slot; reinstalled the old glass panels; stained and Marine varnished the doors and frame; and, of course, hung the doors. After being reinstalled, a week of warm, rainy weather caused some swelling of the wood, making it difficult to open and close the door. Omar and Abdellah came right away to plane the hinge-side edge of the actively used door, allowed time for any necessary further adjustment, and returned to refinish that edge. The doors now work perfectly.

Description of Work: I needed some shelves made for my living room and needed them done really quickly due to various timing issues. Artistic Wood Crafts delivered the project flawlessly and was able to do it in a really astonishingly short period of time.

Description of Work: They assisted in renovation of my apartment. First, they custom make new baseboards and installed throughout my apartment and they custom built 2 cabinets for my bathroom. They stripped and refinished all the doors in my apartment, replaced all the handles, fixed locks, made them beautiful, and now I have hired them to custom build my kitchen cabinets. They are honest, hardworking and take real pride in their work. Their custom woodworking is really beautiful.