What I liked most about working with Jeff was his honesty and pride in his work…

What I liked most about working with Jeff was his honesty and pride in his work…

Description Of Work

Removed, restored, primed, painted, and reinstalled original wood trim, and also custom-made new shoe molding, in two rooms.  Plaster repair and painting of four rooms.  Restoration of casement windows, including hardware stripped clean and realigned, and weather stripping installed.

Comments

After a fire on the roof of our condo building (including water damage from putting the fire out), we had a number of projects that needed attention, including all of the original trim in our living room and foyer.  Those rooms had to be gutted and re-plastered.  But we really wanted to preserve the original integrity of these spaces. So we hired Oak Brothers to carefully remove all the old trim (baseboard, picture moldings, and crown moldings), strip it down to bare wood, repair it, then prime and paint and reinstall it. They did a stunning job!  They even had a special knife made so we could reproduce the original shape of the shoe molding.  (It was too fragile to be removed without breaking and was cheaper to reproduce than to strip and repaint.)  You could never tell, by looking at it, that the trim had been removed…except that it was in pristine condition!  Given the fact that our building has a rotunda, thus translating into half of our living room being circular in form, this was no small task.  And many problem areas that had existed from prior to the fire (where the trim had pulled away from the wall, especially in the rounded areas) were corrected.  So the trim looked like new—new-old, that is.  It looked new, but like it belonged there.  It just looked like someone had done a really good job of maintaining it (which they hadn’t)!  Oak Brothers truly brought out the vintage beauty and elegance of these rooms. We also then hired Oak  Brothers to do plaster repair and painting of four rooms besides the living room and foyer, the bathroom and a bedroom.  Jeff was careful to select high quality materials and helped me choose colors that were perfect for what we needed in these rooms. Oak Brothers has done a lot of work in our building, including the restoration of all the 10-light casement windows on the facade of our building (a total of 53 windows).  While this project is ongoing, the five sets of casement windows in our apartment (10 sashes) are finished.  As with the trim, they look like new windows, except that they are the original windows!  And they actually close and open freely now!  Having the hardware stripped clean and realigned, and weather stripping installed on the exterior side of the jamb also makes them feel secure and be airtight.  The result is both functional and absolutely gorgeous. What I liked most about working with Jeff was his honesty and pride in his work, which meant I could feel at ease letting Oak Brothers take care of the project while I was out-of-town on business trips or simply too busy at work to check up on things every day.   There were a number of times when I received calls from Jeff to inform me of issues that needed attention for which he wanted my direction (rather than just doing what was expedient and later telling me he had to keep moving on the job), or to provide suggestions about how to resolve a problem that had arisen.  He made many thoughtful decisions which gave me confidence that he had my best interests at heart.  Jeff even dissuaded me from a few projects that he felt were not necessary to achieve my goals, even though that meant reducing his own profit — that’s integrity. Oak Brothers is trustworthy, skillful, detail-oriented, and thoughtful in their approach to their craft.  And craftsmen they are — while they don’t do things on the cheap, they have long-term investment in mind in the quality of the work they do.  And boy, does that quality ever show in the final product.