Real-Life Communication
You are a furniture restorer and you own your own shop. Although
you have several years of experience refinishing all kinds of furniture, your
specialty is restoring old furniture.
Shortly after arriving at your
shop this morning, a customer comes in carrying an old red chair. The chair's
paint is cracked and peeling and it looks extremely worn.
The customer
tells you that all she wants you to do is repaint it. She'd paint it herself
if she had time because, after all, she's the one that painted it to begin
with. Red is her favorite color and it matches the other chairs and her table
that she has in her kitchen. She thinks with a new coat of paint, it will
look just like new again.
You assure the customer that you can refinish
the chair for her. She tells you to match the color as closely as possible
and wants to know when it will be ready. You tell her that she can pick the
chair up on Friday.
After your customer leaves, you take the chair
into your shop so you can begin working on it. As soon as you begin to strip
off the old paint, you notice an old set of initials engraved into the back
left leg. Not giving it much thought, you continue to strip the paint.
Then
you realize that there're tiny little nails holding the chair together. By
the time you're finished removing all the old paint, you've also discovered
that the chair is made of solid oak and that, according to the shape of the
back spindles, it was probably carved by hand.
By this point, you're
quite sure that the chair is more valuable than what the customer probably
thinks it is. Before you call her and tell her that, you decide you should
look through your old books and confirm your suspicions.
You know the
chair is quite old, so you pull out your reference material that refers to
the Mossley Furniture Co. and to Turner Furniture Inc. Mossley produced furniture
in the late 1800s and Turner produced furniture in the 1940s.
After
looking through your reference material, these are the descriptions you find
on the types of furniture built by both furniture companies.
Turner
Furniture Inc.
- Turner Furniture Inc. built furniture throughout the 1930s and 1940s
- Turner Furniture Inc. used a wide variety of wood, including oak, pine
and mahogany
- This furniture company specialized in chairs and dining-room hutches
- Small screws were used to attach the pieces of the furniture together
- Turner Furniture's trademark was to engrave a number on the bottom of
the piece of furniture
Mossley Furniture Co.
- The Mossley Furniture Company produced furniture in the late 1800s and
early 1900s
- All Mossley furniture was made of solid oak
- Small nails were used to hold the pieces of the chair together
- Some pieces were hand-carved
- Mossley Furniture specialized in tables but did build some matching chairs
- The builder's initials are engraved on one of the chair's legs
Using the information listed above, can you determine if the chair
was built by the Mossley Furniture Company or by Turner Furniture Inc.?