The phone on the wall at Antiques on Sixth was made by the Northern Electric Company, circa 1916.
And when you turn the crank and hold the handset to your ear, the voice that gets on the line is that of a live operator, wondering where you're calling from.
"There's no caller display on that phone... so you can do crank calls," joked J.J. Johnson, who has been in the business restoring old treasures with store owner Patrick Kelly the past two years.
Kelly, a four-year Prince George resident, opened his downtown store at the corner of Sixth Avenue and George Street in May 2010. Trained in sports physiotherapy and kinesiology, Kelly was living in Toronto in 1976 when he bought a house totally furnished with antiques, and that's where he discovered his passion for restorations.
"I didn't know how to hammer a nail when I started," said Kelly. "To me it was just old furniture, and I started looking at how to refurbish and refinish, thinking I could do a few pieces to help pay the mortgage and before I knew it, in a couple years, the mortgage was paid off."
In addition to local repairs, Kelly and Johnson do a lot of work for museums, including some restorations of ancient pieces. Work on some of the older furniture requires scrapings of lacquers to be sent to labs for testing to determine their age.
"We might be downstairs with a mortar and pestle re-creating a 500-year-old shellack," said Kelly. "If you have to do repairs on it, you have to use age-appropriate wood to match the grain. There are places that deal in old furniture and old buildings and they take the wood apart and age-categorize it and you can buy it."
Kelly was asked to repair an intricately-carved 150-year-old oak china cabinet that had been smashed with a hatchet by a robber to get at the contents inside. He took a wax impression of one of gargoyles that sat on top of the cabinet and used the three-dimensional mold to guide him when he was hand-carving out a replacement. When it was pieced together, it was virtually impossible to tell where it had been broken.
"I guess you know you're doing your job right when the insurance adjuster comes by and asks, 'Which piece did you do?'" said Kelly.
An Italian museum sent Kelly a wood cabinet estimated to be 3,500 years old that had been uncovered in an archaeological dig in Florence. After finding a chunk of 3,500-year-old Northern Italian oak, he used the same wax mold process to duplicate the piece, and was able to complete the repair. He later received a congratulatory letter from the museum to let Kelly know the piece was on display in the entrance hall and that the seam was indistinguishable.
"There's really nothing that can't be repaired," said Kelly. "It's a matter of being really patient."
The Internet has been a godsend for antiques dealers, saving hours of research work in libraries every week. "We'd need a lot of books around here if we couldn't go online," said Johnson.
"You want to know when it was made and who made it. If you go to sell it to the public it has to be genuine.
"Some of the stuff takes you days. I'm doing a set of legs on a table and it's taken me three days to do three legs, just to sand it, and touch it up. We leave the nicks and cracks in, you just want it to look good."
The antiques come from private sources, estate sales and garage sales, and there's never a shortage of work.
"We try to estimate fair market value," said Kelly. "Our market is not Paris or New York, but we have an extremely educated market here."
