Much of the furniture in my home is recycled, in some way or another. Because so much of modern furniture is made from synthetic, toxic materials--and not even very attractive--and new furniture made from natural materials is so very expensive, my husband Larry and I have a lot of fun finding old pieces and turning them into great furniture. Larry is a fixit by nature anyway, so nothing makes him happier than salvaging something of worth and bringing it back into good use.
I wish I had photos to show you, but there were problems with lighting and getting far enough away to get the whole piece in the picture...
Each piece has a story of how we found it and what we did to restore it, so here they are.
Mahogany desk
This is an old Mission-style solid mahogany library table with two drawers under the top. I found it at a garage sale. It had been used in an attorney's office and had a leather top that was ripped. I think I paid $25 for it. Larry removed the leather top and sanded it down, then I applied plant-based Auro clear wood finish.
Oak desk from Stanford University Library
Since I found the first library table at a garage sale, Larry and I set out with his truck one Saturday to make the round of garage sales. We looked and looked to no avail, and finally, late in the afternoon, we went to Urban Ore, in Berkeley, California (this was when we still lived in California). In addition to salvage building materials, they also have a large warehouse of salvage furniture and other items. I walked the aisles looking for "library table" and found nothing. Then Larry walked the aisles looking for "oak" and sure enough, squeezed between two desks were all the pieces of an oak library table, disassembled. A tag inside a drawer said "Stanford University Library." I think we paid $50 for this one. The problem was that all the edges around the top were badly damaged. So my clever husband sawed all the edges off and put on a decorative border of purpleheart wood, which, yes, is purple. Then he made new handles for the drawers to match. I love this desk. It's the primary desk I use for writing. It is finished with Flecto Diamond Finish (water-based), which gives a quick-dry, hard finish, water-repellant finish.
Recycled rubber tree desk
When I needed a third desk, we looked for another old desk, but Clearwater, Florida doesn't have the same store of Arts and Crafts treasures you can find in the San Francisco Bay Area. So I purchased a new table in the same style, without the drawers, that was being sold as a dining table. It is made from parawood. Now parawood is the tree that produces latex rubber. It is often called "Malaysian Oak" because it is so hard and durable. After 25 years of latex production, the tree ceases to produce sufficient quantities of latex, so it is cut and a new tree is planted in its place. The cut tree is then "recycled" for use in the manufacture of fine furniture.
Sofa and wing chair
When I got my first apartment many years ago, my grea aunt Ollie gave me an old wing chair. I recovered it with cotton upholstery. Then many years later, Larry and I got married and we decided we needed a sofa. So we went to a storage auction and found a beautiful old 6-foot camelback sofa with carved wood trim. We decided we wanted to pay $50 for the sofa. The lot also included a fairly large area rug, but we weren't interested in that. The auction started and we bid up to $50 and stopped. The man standing next to us kept bidding and finally purchased the lot for $100. We turned to him and just started chatting about how we really wanted that sofa, but couldn't pay more than $50. Amazingly, he said he was only interested in the rug (!) and sold us the sofa for $50. It badly needed recovering, but that had to wait until we had the money. So we just covered it with a blanket for a while. Within a few years I had enough money to recover both the sofa and the chair with coordinating natural fiber fabrics--a plaid linen, and a cotton fabric with a nice vine pattern. Both were similar shades of grey and black. The fabric still looks like new, now, more than ten years later.
Kitchen island
We have a long, narrow kitchen that needed more counterspace. We wanted an island, but none of the pre-manufactured islands were the right size, and besides, Larry wanted something creative. We took measurements and then set out to find something the right size to use for a base. We looked in the phone book and got a list of used furniture stores. I asked Larry if he wanted me to put them in some kind of efficient driving order and he said, no, let's go to the first one on the list. I had in mind I was willing to spend $100 on the base. What caught our eye was an old commercial Singer pedal sewing machine table, that had a wrought iron base and a wooden top. It was exactly the right size, and the legs were adjustable to any height, but it was $200. I asked the sales clerk if she could come down on the price, and she called the owner. The owner said, "How about $100?" We brought it home, put on a new wood tabletop and some wheels, and it's perfect.
With some imagination and skill, it's easy to restore old furniture or even make something new out of bits and pieces of something else entirely. Just use your creativity.
