Reincarnating old wood into something chic

Terri Amato of Lake Hill wanted floors that showed love but not distress from her two dogs, so she installed a floor reclaimed from Coney Island’s infamous boardwalk’s Ipe boards — one of the hardest woods with a fire rating the same as concrete — finished with Woca oil, an all natural, plant-based wood oil finish. Sauer laid 300 feet of the same Ipe wood onWoodstock’s Comeau Trails for pedestrians to traverse the swampy grounds. “Oh My God, if this wood could talk, do you know how many famous people walked on it?” she said. “It’s like a chunk of history.” Amato said that cleaning the floor involves using a few drops of water, and nothing else. “I have a lab who keeps all his water in his jowls for 30 feet,” she mused. Amato, a breast cancer survivor, said she appreciates the all natural finish for her own health and that of her pets. Amato and her husband got so hooked on the warmth of wood that they have begun to fill their home with more and more wood products like custom bead boarding. Next up, a wood ceiling.

Enterprising reuse

Furniture maker Emerson DuBois of Kingston, owner of Enterprise Americana, takes shafted home furniture and updates it into “Contempotique” style of funky, edgy, one-of-a-kind pieces. “For years I collected broken furniture and related items always with the goal of fixing, restoring and making them useable again,” said DuBois. “It got pretty bad there for a while. A few years ago I found my self with a garage full of broken stuff and decided to do something about it. So I started working on them one piece at a time.”

DuBois said he doesn’t pay a dime for his materials, but rather scavenges them from his construction sites. “The process, unless it’s a special order, is that we look at a piece of furniture and we either repair it to the point of making it a usable piece or we try to totally transform it,” said DuBois. “When building a piece often the material dictates what it’s going to be. Realize that we’re often limited by our supply. We can’t run off to Home Depot and get more 150-year-old wide pine boards. There are certain standards but other than standard height for chair seats, tables … It goes something like this: here we have enough of this material to make a table top six-foot by three-foot and we have legs to match. OK, here’s a table. We have doors and hardware, we ask the question, ‘What does this need to be?’ … and we make it so. When rescuing a piece, sometimes it’s as simple as, what would make this otherwise boring item [become] exciting?”

In this line of work there’s the self-satisfaction felt by artists. “We make these pieces for ourselves, what we want to see, what we think is fun and a little bit of what’s ‘in’ now and then we hope someone else feels the same way,” said DuBois. “Sometimes we’re lucky, sometimes not, and sometimes [we’re] blind-sided. Funny thing is we have a piece for sale that we loved, we were thrilled putting it together, and it got virtually no attention. Then, out of the blue, someone fell in love with it and is willing to have it shipped toCalifornia. Go figure.”

DuBois said he sees an ebb and flow to the antiques market, with a core group whose interest never falters. For others antiques become fashionable; for others yet it’s just “old junk.” DuBois pointed out the uptick of home-decorating shows and shows focusing on antiques, pickers and pawn shop. “Plus, ‘green’ is very fashionable right now and what’s more green than keeping these pieces of history out of our landfills?” Dubois said. “Also I think now more than ever people want to have unique things in their homes.”