DESPITE their worries about a sour economy and the possibility of war, or perhaps because of them, people in Connecticut continue to spend serious money on building, rebuilding, furnishing and burnishing their houses.

To get the job done right, high-end nesters here, and in other areas of the country as well, count on a cadre of Connecticut artisans. These craftsmen and women offer arcane skills that range from regilding picture frames and mirrors to hand-forging 17- and 18-century hardware. Even in this economy, they have all the work they can handle.

For example, Alice Prescott Whyte of Canton has a thriving business restoring and conserving antique paintings. ''If I succeed, the results of my work are invisible to the naked eye,'' she said.

Ms. Whyte does work for antique dealers, museums, galleries, corporations and private collectors from Connecticut to Texas. The goal is to return the painting to the artist's original intent by cleaning or repairing it.

To perform this work, she uses high-technology skills like digital imaging, which helps her imagine what the original painting looked like. But she also applies an instinct that money can't buy for knowing when to stop. ''First, do no harm'' is an aphorism that applies to fine arts conservation as well as medicine.

Ms. Whyte, 47, sees her life's calling as a synthesis of many disciplines and interests -- chemistry, mathematics, art history, philosophy and aesthetics.

''When you're working on a painting, you have to get into the heart and mind of the artist,'' she said. ''You have to understand the time period in which he or she was working, to understand the context of the art. You have to examine and identify the pigments used, the way the brush was applied. This is intimate work. I find hairs from the brushes, sometimes even human hair, as I proceed.''

Ms. Whyte never knows what her efforts will reveal.

''Recently I was cleaning a picture, a portrait of a Greek Revival house in an autumnal landscape,'' she said. ''It was incredibly dirty. I uncovered a signature and a date, Edmund Darch Lewis, 1874.''

Lewis (1835-1910) was a prolific American landscape painter whose works are popular with collectors today. According to Sotheby's auction house, large oil paintings by Lewis sell for $15,000 to $20,000. So Ms. Whyte's work transformed an old family heirloom into a valuable asset.

A Renaissance Craft

The frames that surround paintings get almost as much attention as the pictures themselves these days, and frames are the province of Neil C. Layne of Southport.

Mr. Layne, 39, is a gilder and carver who works on antique furniture, looking glasses, picture frames -- any object that originally had gold leaf on it. His clients include antique dealers, collectors and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. Mr. Layne recently restored a Russian throne chair purportedly owned by Catherine the Great, which a dealer had sold to an individual.

Mr. Layne's craft was common in the Renaissance, but very few people practice it anymore. Mr. Layne called his work ''extremely low tech,'' performed as it would have been in 16th-century Italy -- by hand, painstakingly.

''We use only traditional tools, formulas and techniques,'' said Mr. Layne, a 1986 graduate of the School of Visual Arts in New York City who has had his own business since 1992.

One of those techniques is French gesso re-cutting, in which he uses tiny hook-shaped metal scrapers to carve details into as many as 30 coats of gesso, a thin plaster-like substance, which is built up coat by coat on the object to be gilded, and into which leaves and other ornaments can be carved. Then the gold leaf is applied.

To be a good restorer, Mr. Layne said, it is necessary to know the history of furniture as well as how to do the work.

''A leaf carved in France is not the same as one carved in England,''' he said.

A Love for Old Wood

Craig Farrow, a Woodbury cabinetmaker, loves the furniture made by his professional ancestors in the 17th- and 18th-centuries. Because these pieces can be difficult to find, and sometimes cost in the millions of dollars, he has a thriving business making copies of them.

Like Mr. Layne, Mr. Farrow, 50, works in the old, slow ways, using antique tools whenever possible, and making his own tools if necessary to recreate an antique with faithful precision. In creating a copy of a rare corner cupboard for a Connecticut doctor who is building a vacation home in Vermont, Mr. Farrow fashioned his own sash plane to get the glazed front doors just right.

The original of the corner cupboard is an important piece in the Americana collection of the Yale University Art Gallery. Originally made in the 18th century for a house in North Branford, the cupboard is of white pine and tulip poplar and stands eight feet tall. It has all the details collectors yearn for -- a glazed door in the top section with a carved heart-shaped motif in the center, which opens to an interior with a large shell at the top and a central rosette; paneled doors below; fluted pilasters topped by carved rosettes on the sides. Mr. Farrow has been working on his copy for almost a year.