 Hello everyone, and thank you for joining us for today's webinar. This is the final in your 8-part series in complement to the Seattle Heritage Responders Training. These programs have been made possible through the generous grant and in support of the National Endowment for the Unities. Since today's program is the final session before our in-person meeting on November 1 and 2, I'll email you all following this webinar with an update on your attendance record. Please be sure to finish viewing all 8 programs before you meet again in person. And before we begin the presentation, just a quick and final reminder of technical notes. On your screen you'll see several boxes, including one labeled chat on the left-hand side. You can use this chat box to say hello, ask questions, share any information or resources that you'd like. If you post a question in the chat box, you'll receive a response from me. Just a note that today I am showing up in the chat window as Eric foreshows. I'm out of the office and connecting this remotely, so that's why. But Eric will respond to your questions, they'll be noted, collected, and then I will verbally ask them of our presenter at the conclusion of this presentation. Today our presenter is shared a PDF with us that is available in the files box at the bottom of your screen. So just click on the title to highlight it in blue and then click on the download button to send coffee to your computer. And with that, I'm very pleased to introduce you all to today's presenter, John Brandon. John is the owner and principal conservator at East Point and Furniture Conservation. East Point is nationally recognized for providing conservation services to individuals and institutions that place a high value on their furniture. John is certified by the Smithsonian Institution to work on objects ranging from national treasures to family airlines. With 35 years of experience, he has worked on major collections of American and European furniture for museums, U.S. government, and private collectors. As an NHR team member, John has responded to large and small disasters, including both superstorm sandy and hurricane hardwood. And with that, I'd like to turn things over to John for his presentation on wooden and upholstered furniture salvage. Thank you, Jess. And hello to everybody. And just to sound check, I want to make sure everyone can hear me okay. I'm speaking at a normal level. And I hope you can all hear me. I noticed that we have a... Okay, good. Thank you, Jess. We have a large group today. That's wonderful. And so I see that we have a wide cross-section of people's working backgrounds. So that's good. This will be a general presentation that is specific to furniture. And I hope I can prepare you for salvaging furniture. My goal is to make this as practical as possible. And I think you'll find it straightforward. So in the beginning here, I'm going to show you some pictures of an historic village museum that experienced a flood. And I've been involved in several disaster responses. But this doesn't mean that I know everything there is to know. What it does mean is that I have experience. And what that experience has taught me is to be ready for anything. And when you run into a situation where you don't know what to do, you can consult with a colleague if you need advice or call somebody on the phone. And that's just what our team leader, Dennis, is doing here during our response to the Houston disaster. We had discovered some taxidermy that none of us knew anything about. So Dennis called a friend who happens to be a taxidermist. So it's not unusual to find yourself in unfamiliar territory. Just to be clear, salvage is the initial response to a disaster aimed at saving the object. We're not talking about conservation treatment. That will come later when the salvage operation is over and the disaster is behind you. You're probably familiar with this list and could include many more items on it if you thought about it. In my experience, the most frequent kind of a disaster involves water. Even if it's a fire event, there's usually a heavy water component because of the fire department blasting everything with their water hoses. Or the sprinkler system in the building has soaked everything. Most of the furniture you encounter, the primary material will be wood. But it often includes other materials. So you may have to call on your training for those types of materials, even though you're dealing with furniture. And by the way, the handout that I have posted down for you to all have, it includes almost all of these notes that I'm showing in the slides. So don't feel like you need to take copious notes during this presentation. I think you'll find that handout is complete. So here's an example or one example of a non-wood piece of furniture. While there is probably some wood underneath the seat that holds the frame together, the chair is primarily leather and horn, plus the upholstery foundation. Upholstery foundation materials include everything but the show cover. In this case, the show cover is the leather. And the foundation gives it shape and provides the strength for sitting. But we're going to talk more about upholstery in a moment. So wood is a relatively durable material. It falls somewhere in the middle range of durability of objects. And we can prioritize furniture based on how it's constructed, such as having veneers or materials that are attached to it, such as the gold leaf or the upholstery. So in terms of high priority items, when you're looking at furniture, and as I said, typically we're dealing with a wet event, veneered furniture will be a very high priority. And that's because of the adhesives that hold the veneer to the substrate. So you may find detached veneers, gilded objects, which can be very susceptible to water, upholstered pieces because they really soak up water, a lot of fabric and a lot of stuffing material is present in upholstered pieces. And any other kind of composite piece. Since wet events are the most common, let's cover that first. So wood is a hygroscopic material and there are consequences for that. Here's just one example. These are before and after pictures of a flooded church interior. The water level rose about halfway up the windows, so it was very deep water. And this is another picture of a flood aftermath inside an historic schoolhouse. The furniture, if a room like this gets flooded, wooden furniture floats around the room in the deep water. And then when the water recedes, the furniture drops in place wherever it is. You'll notice the two desks in front didn't move and that's because they're bolted to the floor. Just to go back to this church scene, the same thing happened with the pulpit and the pews. All of those items floated in the water and when the water receded they just dropped right where they were floating. So I mentioned that wood is hygroscopic and that means that it will absorb water. And we need to be aware of this when you encounter wet wood. So to illustrate this, we're looking at three boards. These are oak boards and we're looking at the end grain. Let me get my pointer here. So this is the end grain of each board here and the same on the bottom. And all of these boards started out about the same width from this point over to this string about eight inches wide. So the bottom board is fully saturated with water. The middle board is at about 12% moisture content and the top board is essentially oven dry and has no water content. As I said, they all started out the same width, eight inches. And you can see that they have changed dimensions. In fact, the board on top, because it's so dry, it's shrunk about a half of an inch. And this will happen to furniture when it gets wet during a flood. So things to look for with wet wood. It's going to take on the weight of the water it absorbs. High humidity will activate mold growth. Veneers and joinery may delaminate because of water-soluble adhesives. And veneers can become deformed or warped. Very similar to if you stick your hand in a bucket of water and leave it in there. Your skin becomes fully soaked with water and then it looks wrinkled. And veneer can do the same thing when it gets soaked up with water. So they can become deformed as they get wet or as they dry out. And as we just saw, wood will expand when it gets wet and this can cause doors and drawers to get stuck shut. Blanching of coatings means that the water has penetrated into the finish and caused a disruption of the finish, which impairs the transparency of the finish and it turns white. And I'm going to show you some examples of these conditions and then we'll look at salvage procedures. Here's an example of a phone operator switchboard and it's contained in a wooden cabinet. This piece was almost completely submerged in water and you can see that waterline on the left side of the cabinet. What you see on the surface as a hazy white layer is a combination of blanched coating and active mold growth. This is an extreme case, but you'll run into varying degrees of this. Here's an example of active mold on legs of a table. You may be more familiar with seeing mold like this. And this is an example of a veneered panel on a chair leg that's delaminating as a result of water exposure. Another example of veneered furniture. This one is extreme with every inch being covered in veneers. And here's that same desk showing one side in raking light, which demonstrates how extensive veneer delamination can be. So these are parts of the table that are detached because of exposure to water. Some structural pieces and some veneers. And when you encounter loose elements, they should be gathered up, labeled and placed in some kind of container for safe keeping so that they don't get lost. You might be tempted to place them in a plastic bag, which is standard museum practice for those of you in collections care, but if the items are wet, it's not a good idea to enclose them in plastic because then they won't be able to dry out and it will promote mold growth. So in this example, I'm showing the pieces stored in a drawer that's part of the table with an identifying label placed inside the drawer. A small cardboard box could work just as well as this little drawer. When you need to move an object that has damaged veneers, you'll need to take some precautions before wrapping it in padding or a padding blanket. The front of this clock case is covered in a variety of different kinds of veneers. And in this case, a water pipe in the ceiling burst and sprayed water on these veneers. But before we look at the damaged veneers, I want to say a word about moving objects like this. In the right hand photo, you can see that it's wrapped fairly snugly in a furniture pad. And be aware that tall case clocks like this should be disassembled before moving. In fact, they're built such that they are intended to be disassembled. The bonnet or the top piece of the clock slides forward and off the case. And then the clockworks can be removed. And the clockworks includes the dial, pendulum, and the weights. So on the right, you can see that the bonnet is removed. And the backboard is sticking up at the top of the blanket. The backboard is a continuous piece of wood from the top to the bottom. And it makes the case rigid. So you can feel comfortable lifting and carrying the case by the backboard. Now let's take a closer look at the bottom panel where most of the veneer damage occurred. So here's that bottom panel. And you may notice a couple of horizontal cracks. And I'll point those out for you. Those would be here. And there's another one here. These are very old cracks. And you can tell that because the cracks are dark and they have darkened with age. If these were new splits, you would expect to see fresh or light colored wood along the edges of the cracks. Remember that this entire panel, this whole thing, is a thin layer of veneer glued on to a secondary wood substrate. And the old dark cracks are stable. And by that, I mean the veneers are still well adhered to the substrate. What's happened here is that the substrate would split or crack many years ago. And the veneer, being very thin, followed the substrate and split at the same time as the substrate. Also notice at the top right corner and the bottom left corner, there are veneer losses. So that would be right up here, that light spot. And right down here, this light spot. Each one is about an inch long. So these are veneer losses. And the pine wood substrate is visible here as lighter colored wood. So these things I've just pointed out, the cracks and the previous veneer losses, are not of great concern in terms of wrapping the object in a pad. And that's because these areas are stable and they're still well adhered. But when we view this panel from a different angle, you'll see a condition that should be a red flag in terms of wrapping the object. So here you can see, we're looking at it from the side now. It's the same panel. And you can see delaminated, tinted, puckered, or whatever term you want to use to describe these fragile veneer segments. They are definitely unstable. But by some miracle, they're still in place. And this is another section further down the panel. So you can see the lifting veneers. And you can also see one of these old cracks right along here. That's one of those old stable cracks. But everything else is unstable and delaminating. So it's not hard to imagine the danger and the damage that can happen if this is wrapped in a padded blanket. Because the fabric of the pad can easily catch on the protruding pieces and the sharp edges and rip the veneers off the object. The solution to this is fairly simple by using a barrier layer between the object and the blanket. In this case, glassine paper is used. Two or three layers of it, actually. But anything will work that is smooth and will slip across the surface without catching on the veneers. So the glassine is wrapped around the area that needs protection. And in this case, it's tucked under the lower edges so that no tape or attachment is necessary for the glassine. And then it can be wrapped in the blanket, and it's now safe to move. Here's an example of joinery that is separating. Even old repairs may come apart. OK, we're talking about this joint right here. That's a dowel joint that had been repaired previously. And it got wet, and it's coming apart again. And this is almost always due to water-soluble adhesives that get wet. Here's an example of what blanching looks like. In this case, the whole table got wet, but it was quickly dried using towels, which saved most of the finish, except the spot where a book was laying on the surface. Water seeped under that book, and the book was never moved. So the water was trapped there for a long time. And this is a close-up of that blanched area. Notice the paper along the edge that is stuck to the tabletop. And I'm talking about right along here, along this edge of the blanching. Those are little remnants of paper. This is a caution to be careful when you separate objects from each other that have been wet, even if they have subsequently dried out, because they could be stuck together. I'm not going to recommend that you attempt repairing the blanched area. That's a tricky maneuver that should be left to a conservator, but beyond drying the piece, there's no urgency in fixing this blanched finish. It can be taken care of at a later date. OK, so let's talk about salvage actions. And here are the most important actions to be considered. If the furniture is in a wet room or is exposed to elements, then hopefully you can relocate it to a dry storage area where you can take the furniture for drying it out. If you don't have a dry location, then dehumidifiers can be used to dry out a room. I can't emphasize enough that wet furniture needs to be handled carefully. It will be heavy, and you need to be careful about handling the loose joinery and the veneers. Here's an example of a dry storage area where wet objects have been moved. You'll notice the stacks of chairs, which is not the best thing to do, but you won't always have the perfect dry storage area, so you need to make do with what you can in terms of space. And as I mentioned earlier, have helpers to move large objects and make a plan for safe moving. By far, most damage occurs to furniture during moving and transportation. So make sure everybody knows and understands the plan before moving the object. In this case, this large bench was disassembled into two pieces before transporting. And this was particularly large object that required many hands. So this is the upper section, going down the stairwell, and the lower section. So we just made sure we had plenty of people so that it made light work of this. Perhaps you can't move objects to a dry location for whatever reason, or maybe only the floor is wet at the site. In which case, raising the object off the floor using blocks may be the most expedient solution. And by the way, this is a good strategy for normal storage of objects, to prevent them from getting wet during a minor flood event, especially if they're stored in a basement. And then air circulation is important to dry the furniture and to discourage mold. Air circulation speeds up the drying process, and you wanna be sure to stay away from using hot air or heated air. You may have seen commercial salvage companies using hot blowers to dry out a wet house. Those are not good for furniture. They dry the wood way too fast, which promotes distortion of wood and deteriorates finishes, glues, and adhesives, and causes rapid shrinkage of veneer. The idea is to dry the wood slowly and steadily to prevent distortion, cracking, or splitting. And if your furniture has been fully soaked with water, you should plan on at least a week or more for it to dry. Now, upholstered furniture deserves some special attention because you're dealing with a combination of wood and lots of textile materials. Besides drying the upholstery, the next most important thing here is to decide whether to save the upholstery or to remove it. This is usually a curatorial decision and they should be involved in the decision-making process before it's removed. It might be obvious, but I want to remind you that once you remove the upholstery, it's unlikely that it will ever be reinstalled on the object. It just isn't technically possible. But removing it can speed up the drying process, so you'll need to make a choice about saving or not saving the upholstery. If you do decide to remove the upholstery or the show covers, be sure to document the original before removing it. You'll want to document the profiles, the techniques of upholstery and the materials before removal. So here's an example of a couple of sofas that were in a flood. Well, all of these chairs and the sofas were in a flood. And we ran into this very question, whether or not to remove the upholstery and it turns out that these are important sofas that belong to an important Civil War general. And this is the fabric that he actually sat on when it was in his house. It's the original upholstery fabric. Then here we have the curator and one of the collection assistants having a discussion about whether or not to save this upholstery. This is more of the same suite of furniture. This is a silk upholstery and let me get my pointer back. So around here we have wool, fringe and silk show covers here. And as I said, the question was whether or not to save this upholstery. And it was badly damaged, very wet and which created a lot of staining and tide lines on the fabric, which I'm sure there's ways to deal with this. It was considered, but when we took a close up look and removed a little bit of the fringe, we noticed here this bright blue color. That's the original color of the upholstery from 1867 approximately and it had faded to this dull, silvery, just beigy kind of color. So at this point, the discussion quickly turned to, oh, we're not representing this furniture correctly, we wanna re-upholster. And in this case, we decided to remove only the show cover and that means only the silk and then it also included removing these trims because they had also faded. All of the other foundation materials were left in place and this is what the chair looked like when the show covers came off. So we have the original tufting still in place. This is all 1867 workmanship and materials. We have the cotton batting. We have a cotton, this is called a, oh, it's just called the cover cloth. Underneath that are the springs, the webbing, the horse hair stuffing, more muslin and as I mentioned, the original tufting has been preserved and we're able to work on things even while this stuff is still in place and this was undergoing a cleaning treatment. So here's the chair after application of new silk show covers. So in this case, the decision was made involving the curator and the collections committee to remove just the show cover to preserve the original workmanship of the tufting and all the foundation materials and reapply new show covers. But in some cases, it might not be advisable to try and save the upholstery. These are chairs that were in a flood and are from a theater and they're used as props in production. The property manager for the theater advised us that the chair frames were worth salvaging but she didn't want to save the upholstery and in fact, they regularly get reappolstered depending on the production that they're used for. So in this case, the upholstery is considered expendable and so then you can get out your sharp knife and cut away the upholstery and this is a big help in allowing the wood to dry out. I'm gonna talk a little bit about removing mold. This is starting to get into the realm of treatment but it's pretty straightforward and I think it's within your capacity to attempt if you have the time and the inclination. So let's look at some examples. First thing you wanna do is let the mold dry. Remove the furniture from the wet environment, let the mold dry out on the surface. If you tried to clean this while the mold is still wet, you would end up smearing it over the surface and that's what we wanna avoid. So if the mold is dry or when it becomes dry, it can be removed by a HEPA vacuum in a brush and right here, we're just starting to vacuum away some of the mold in this area. Vacuuming may not remove all the mold. So for instance, this area has been vacuumed and you can still see those little white spots which are mold spores. In which case you can resort to wiping the mold using a cloth dampened with a solvent. What solvent do you say? Well, here's where I want you to pay close attention because it really matters what you use as your solvent. In this case, I'm wiping bare wood or an unfinished surface and in that case, we can use alcohol mixed with water at a ratio of one to one. The alcohol will kill any remaining mold spores and the dampness helps wipe up the residue. So bare wood has lots of pores in it. The mold spores are growing on the surface. They're also growing down into the pores. Just wiping it with a dry cloth wouldn't get all of that off. So we use this damp method and the alcohol penetrates into the wood and kills any mold spores that don't get wiped away. This is what you see on your rag after wiping aged bare wood. This is dirt and grime and nothing to be concerned about because you can't help but wipe up accumulated dirt. But the real purpose here is to wipe up the mold spores. In this photo, the mold is on a finished surface and that means it's growing on top of a coating or a varnish. In this case, the alcohol mixture I just showed you can damage the coating or the finish. So you can't use the alcohol when a finish is present. A safer alternative is to use straight mineral spirits. You can use a cloth or a paper towel dampened with mineral spirits to wipe off the mold. Mineral spirits is safe for most coatings and it's not as effective at killing residual mold spores but usually when mold is on top of a finish there is not deep penetration of the spores and the wiping action should be effective at removal. And when I'm talking about these solvents I'm just talking about your regular old hardware store variety mineral spirits and I always go for the odorless kind of mineral spirits. This is a homemade mixture of water and alcohol mixed up in my hot and spicy jar and again, just your hardware store variety denatured alcohol. It doesn't have to be pure ethanol. This alcohol will work just fine. Or you could go to the pharmacy and buy 50% isopropyl alcohol. It's already diluted 50% with water. So this you can use right out of the container. No mixture required and that might be the most expedient thing to do during a salvage effort when you're in a disaster mode. Here's another example of mold on furniture particularly on the leather seat. You may recognize this as a Gustave Stickley oak chair and there's a paper label from his workshop on the underside of the seat. But here the mold is growing in the cracks in the aged leather seat. In this case the mold is removed by vacuuming and using a small brush in one hand to sweep the mold toward the vacuum nozzle. The nozzle itself never comes in contact with the chair and I wanna remind you that the mold must be dry before you try this. If you do this while the mold is wet or damp you'll spear it on the surface and drive it further down into the cracks. Notice that the vacuum hose is draped over my shoulder and this prevents the hose from knocking against the furniture. So in previous presentations it's been pointed out that I should be wearing a mask during this operation and that's absolutely right. A mask is essential when working around mold and I'll confess that when this photo was staged I forgot to put on my mask. Here's an example of the brush that I used. It's one of these cheap welding brushes with like china bristle and you can trim these with scissors to make them pointy so that you can get down into a crack and so the picture on the left is before any cleaning and on the left is halfway through the cleaning procedure. So no solvents, just a vacuum and a brush. Now on the underside of the seat this is the original Gustave Stickley paper label that I mentioned and it's glued to the underside of the seat. It's glued to the fabric on the underside of the seat and this label has mold on it. It's those white spots that you see on it. And since this is adhered using a water-based adhesive you wouldn't want to use anything damp to wipe the mold away. And besides that the paper is way too fragile to withstand any sort of wiping action. Okay I'm jumping ahead a little here. This is it after it's been cleaned but this is the technique used for cleaning it. Using a vacuum and a protective cover. So this is a piece of fiberglass screening for plastic screening and I've taped the edges, I cut this screening to about a foot square and I taped the edges so that all of those cut edges are not exposed. And then you can bring your vacuum to the paper label and use it to suck up the mold right through the screen but at the same time you're holding the paper down and nothing ever comes in contact and none of your tools or implements come in contact with the label. So that's what the action would look like working over a screen. So now let's look at a fire situation. The main thing here is careful handling to prevent further damage. Picture of a client's house having a house fire. This is a very dramatic photo but luckily the fire was contained just to the kitchen where you see the flames jumping out the window. It was primarily a smoke event in the rest of the house. Smoke and soot. And this is what you'll see in the aftermath of a fire. It's always a mess and not only is there smoke, soot and ash but everything is soaking wet from the fire department. Dealing with fire is actually similar to dealing with a wet event. It includes drying, vacuuming and air circulation and what I want to impress on you is the first item on the list to avoid touching the surface of soot and ash. That can cause a real problem when it comes time to clean the object because touching soot causes it to become embedded in the surface. So if you need to pick something up try and get it from underneath or from a non-presentation surface. I'm not going to go into cleaning soot and ash very far because it's tricky and I think it's best left to a conservator. Or possibly a conservator could consult on your particular situation to develop the best cleaning protocol and then train some volunteers how to do it but it can be a risky treatment. One thing you can do is removing smoking odor using activated charcoal deodorizers and circulating the air. This is an example of carbonized wood. It's a four foot tall wood sculpture and in terms of salvage there's not a lot to be done except not to touch the charred wood if you need to move it. As you can imagine, carbonized wood is very fragile. After salvage is complete. After the salvage operation is over then a conservator can consolidate the wood and restore the finish. This is a small painted box that was in a house fire and has soot on the surface. So again you want to be careful how you touch something like this. This was cleaned using a dry eraser technique and dry cleaning methods are usually best because wet cleaning can actually drive the soot further down into the surface. Especially on aged painted surfaces. And just so you can appreciate why this is so important. This is a close up view of an aged paint surface showing an alligator texture. And you can see how easy it would be to trap excess soot in the texture of this surface. And that's why careful handling is so important. Now I want to give you an idea of how smoke and soot can penetrate an object. This is a cabinet with a fitted interior. And the outside really doesn't look too bad for having been in a fire. Just, I'll just point out on the surface you'll see these, get my pointer going here. These little defects, those are normal, not normal, but intentional defects in the wood. This was insect riddled wood that the cabinet maker chose to use for building this cabinet. So that's not damage from the fire. That's an intentional thing in the object. And on the inside when you open the doors you can see that it still looks pretty good even a little cleaner than the outside. But soot tends to settle out on horizontal surfaces and can penetrate inside closed cabinets. So to finish up, I'd like to show you just a couple of examples of how a disaster plan can make or break the recovery from an event. I'm keenly aware of this because I assist organizations with disaster planning and I've seen how it makes a difference. So I think it's worthwhile to be voting just a couple of minutes to it. This is an historic farm museum and its main components are the structures and their contents. This small organization had a rudimentary disaster plan in place. And I mean very rudimentary. The plan said that if the barn ever caught fire that they would bulldoze the back house. Oh, and just a little primer on New England architecture. So this is called the big house, the small little house, the back house and the barn. And they're all connected. Okay, so their rudimentary plan said that if the barn ever caught fire that their plan would be to bulldoze the back house. That house that's second from the left that connects it to the barn and the rest of the structure. Bulldozing the back house would break the connection to the main house. And this was a conscious decision to sacrifice a portion of the building in order to save the rest of the house and its contents. Unlucky for them, they did experience a raging barn fire. But the plan was executed and they successfully saved the main house with all the contents. The barn was consumed in the fire and the back house was bulldozed. And there's a little more to this story. From where I took this picture from where I was standing behind me is there's a chapel on the grounds. And this is the chapel. It's about 100 yards away from the house. And on the night of the fire, they carried out the second part of the plan which was to hand carry collection items from the house over to the chapel. So they organized a human chain and moved everything into the chapel. So this is a real success story and it relied on having a disaster plan as rudimentary as it was. The not so good story happened at this small village museum. So let me get my pointer out again. So the village museum, we can see part of it over here. They've moved these buildings to this location and around to the both sides and behind where this photo was taken is a little scene of an historic village. And the collections are stored in the historic structures and in the warehouses that you see here. Now they did not have a disaster plan and the grounds were flooded a few years ago and the contents of all the buildings including the warehouses got soaking wet, very deep water, again way above the window line. Now they too had a bulldozer and while their intentions were good during cleanup, the bulldozer was used to push the collections out of the warehouses and into this pile. So instead of having a water damage collection, they ended up with a pile of trash. You do very strange things when you're in the grips of a disaster and here's a case where a disaster plan would have helped them think through this scenario ahead of time. And that wraps up my comments for today. So I'm happy to entertain any questions. Great, well thank you so much John. We had just one question come in sort of early on in the presentation, I think it was about 15 or 20 minutes into your remarks, where you're showing an example of an upholstered piece of furniture and Peter was wondering if the tufting on that was wool. I don't know if you remember what that was, let's see if I can find the slide. Yeah, sure. I do remember if the tufting was wool, is that the question? Yes, mhm. Yeah, so I don't know how familiar Peter is with furniture, but I'll just make this so that everyone can understand the answer. The tufting is, the term tuft refers to the profile. It doesn't refer to the materials used. So by tufting, I mean that they installed a button on the front of the piece and connected a string to it and they pulled that string very tight so they create a deep well where that button is and that's called a tuft. So when you saw that chair I was working on that had the tufting and it was, the show cover was removed, that top material that you saw, that fluffy kind of padding, that was cotton batting. So maybe that's what he was asking about whether that was wool or not, but that was cotton batting. Then underneath the cotton batting was the muslin cover. Underneath the muslin cover was horse hair and horse hair is very tough. You could almost think of it like really coarse steel wool. So it has some body and some spring to it. And so when you pull your tufting button very tight it creates that well with a tuft of padding around the well. Peter Schmidt. Okay, I see you say thank you. I guess I explained that well enough. Little hard to explain something so visual, just in words. I think that was great, thank you John. Does anyone have any other questions? Please feel free to go ahead and drop those in the chat window. Again, thank you John for comprehensive overview and for providing the handout as well. Hopefully that will be a useful resource for everyone. You're welcome. I'm gonna go ahead and pull over at the survey link. You can see if there's any other questions. So as with past programs, please just take a few moments to fill out this evaluation. Oh, I'm seeing one question here. So John, Stephanie's wondering if you have any comments on more modern furniture that has plastics. So I think it's a great question. Yeah, that's a good question. I deal mostly with wood, but you're gonna run into plastics. So plastic is not hygroscopic like wood is. So you don't have any of those issues about expansion contraction, soaking up water. If the surface is dirty, it's probably safer to wipe down. You're not in such a hurry to dry the piece. So I think plastic almost falls into a lower priority item than wood. In fact, I would definitely say it does. So that's gonna fall closer to your priority list of ceramics and stone when it comes to high priority. So water is not gonna affect plastic much. Heat will, in a fire, it will melt. So if it's already melted, not a lot you can do, I would definitely say let it cool down before you touch it. You would burn yourself, or if it was still soft and pliable, you may cause deformation, you may unintentionally deform a piece of the plastic. But I think that there's not a lot of special techniques for plastic in terms of salvage. You're welcome, Stephanie. I noticed that I was reminded when I looked at the list, I'm talking to Seattle, and everyone said, when they signed in, they said, hello, good morning. And it's afternoon out here in Maine, so one of those miracles of technology that we're all here at the same time, talking to one another, but it's not really the same time. Galileo or Newton or one of those guys would be amazed at what we do these days. We're having a summer-like day here. It's 80 degrees and humid.