Will Kirk of The Repair Shop was concerned when guest Tracy Emery came in with her grandfather’s dessert wine holder after it had charred under her kitchen light.
In the new episode, jeweler Richard Talman met a mother-daughter duo – Halina and Lesley – who brought him a broken silver ring given to Halina’s mother in Warsaw during World War II as a thank you for risking her life to distribute food to families trapped in the Jewish ghetto.
Leather expert Suzie Fletcher met with Gordon and his sons James and Ross, who brought a pair of curling stones used in Gordon’s father’s team’s victory in the 1979 Grand Match.
Angelina Bakalarou was commissioned to repair an old film poster for the Bollywood film Sholay, while Kirk was entrusted with the mammoth task of restoring charred wood for Emery.
Entering the barn, Emery placed the wooden cooking pot on the table and explained, “It’s a wooden cooking pot, so it was a wooden cooking pot. It’s actually a dessert wine holder, so it opens! There’s a bottle of wine in there, but it’s had a little accident.”
“He was sitting in the kitchen under the countertop light and someone turned the light on and he got a little burned. The only thing left intact from the top was the face, which is amazing because that’s the best part.”
Tracy Emery desperately wanted her grandfather’s wood stove repaired
BBC
Kirk wanted to know who was responsible for the fire, and Emery had to explain: “Well, we don’t know 100 percent, but we think it was my dad. I was gone for two nights and they wanted to watch my cat, and he didn’t like my cat being left in the dark, so he turned on the light under the counter and left it on overnight. When my mom came back in the morning, they found it burned.
“But we were very lucky that only this and the lamp were damaged and I’m very happy that it didn’t catch fire anywhere else. For me, that’s unfortunate because it’s one of my favorite objects.”
The guest further explained that she inherited it from her grandfather after he and his wife bought it for their then pub and placed it on the food counter.
She added: “When my grandfather died, my grandma asked if we made a wish and of course I said the wooden chef. He just sums up my whole childhood for me and when he sat in my kitchen, it was like my grandfather was still telling me his stories.
Will Kirk admitted that he had never tried charcoal restoration
BBC
“I actually keep the speech I gave at his funeral in the wooden table, that’s what’s kept in there. (Dad was) incredibly guilty, he was the one who wanted to get it fixed for me because he knew how much it meant to me.
“Unfortunately, he became ill and passed away about a year ago. Now, fixing it has an added meaning because we all now have a memory of him trying to fix it and it was the one thing he couldn’t do before he died. Please do your best, bring his stories back.”
Kirk took the charcoal grill to his workbench, examined it more closely and admitted, “It’s in really bad shape, I’ve never seen anything so charred on my workbench. I’ve never had to restore charcoal before and this is essentially what it is.”
“So I know the face should go there… oh my god, so I’m missing a ton of wood, basically a whole section of the top of the hat is missing and some parts of the outside. So I need to glue what I have here back together in a way that I can figure out what’s missing.”
Will Kirk left guests in tears when he unveiled the wooden chef
BBC
After working his magic and returning the wooden cook to its original state, Emery was invited back to the barn, where she burst into tears at the sight of her childhood memory.
Fighting back tears, she gasped, “Oh my God! Oh my God, thank you so much! Can I pick him up? Oh, thank you! He’s beautiful! He’s so sweet, thank you, thank you for all your hard work!”
“Look at him, he’s perfect! Look at his face! Just right, thank you! I’m little and I’m so loved by my grandfather. I know what my grandfather would say. He’d look at him and say, ‘He’s brilliant’, that’s what he’d say.
“I lost the two men in my life and now I have him back, so yeah, that just means everything to me. He’s so good! He’s going to go in the kitchen, but he’s going to have a shelf all to himself, no lights, no way.”
