A decades-old General Electric floor-model radio that looks like it could have at one time emitted the sounds of a Franklin Roosevelt fireside chat is becoming a mobile bar. A thick but damaged wooden doorway is resurrected through refinishing, staining and new hardware to form a rectangular tabletop. A metal sculpture of a sailing yacht with a broken lamp enclosed in its hull is rewired so that it now can light up.
What has become old, broken, forgotten, scratched, out of style or useless can become new, restored, dependable, useful, inventive and stylish. Have you wondered whether that drop-leaf table with water stains that seems ready for the trash pile might have a new life? Each year, Americans throw away more than 12 million tons of furniture according to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Perhaps the blender has stopped working and you’re ready to pitch it and order a new one. But wait: consider an alternative.
More people are opting to have their own old furniture repaired, refinished, reused, and restored or to shop and customize older pieces they find. Similarly, more are turning to places like the Hudson Valley Repair Cafes to resurrect objects instead of tossing them into the trash. The big-box stores, national furniture retailers and Amazon may capture economic headlines and dominate commercial advertising, but a thriving economy and culture of local businesses and nonprofit groups exist to offer well-crafted, durable, unique, and inventive furniture. To those employed in restoration, it’s a purposeful endeavor that’s economically wise, supportive of regional communities, creative, and most significantly, sustainable for the Earth.
The circular economy, based on reuse and regeneration of products and materials, has momentum: Globally, it could unlock up to $4.5 trillion in economic growth by 2030, according to UN Trade and Development. So, it’s no wonder that Hudson Valley entrepreneurs and community activists alike are sensing opportunity and affirmation in the economy sustained by the reimagining of furniture and household objects.
It’s rewarding in myriad ways to be able to turn “an outdated piece into something else,” says Gabriel Jasmin, a co-owner and one of the founders of Found & Fixed Hudson Valley, based in Highland in a recent discussion concerning a renovated sideboard which the business cooperative converted into a vanity complete with a vessel sink.
Found & Fixed Hudson Valley evolved from the interest in “flipping furniture” and woodworking that Jasmin and co-founder and co-owner Justine Porter developed a few years ago. They began working together and then incorporated as a worker cooperative in 2023. Their core aim with Found & Fixed is to divert furniture that would otherwise go into landfills and instead repair, refinish, reimagine, and restore in sustainable, eco-friendly ways at affordable prices and give the furniture new life. They started the endeavor in a Dutchess County workshop and moved into Ulster County in early 2023. It operates from a three-bay showroom and workshop at 10 Commercial Avenue in Highland.
Prospective customers come to Found & Fixed for a variety of reasons. They may differ in their tastes and objectives, but a common thread is the desire for something which was not mass-produced. Some people bring a piece of furniture from their home that appears outdated or is well-built, but damaged. Still others want to figure out how to preserve and possibly refurbish furniture they inherited from a family member and are not sure how to make use of it.
You can customize and tailor a piece to your needs, preferences and style. Customers can shop the “furniture rescue wall” and work with Found & Fixed with a timeframe and budget in mind on a portfolio of options to reimagine that item into custom-made furniture. A popular option is Found & Fixed working with a consumer’s existing furniture pieces to modernize, repair, and refurbish them. “We get a lot of, ‘We have this piece of yellow oak, can you refinish it and put on new hardware?’ “ says Lauren “Lo” Miller, also a co-owner of the cooperative.
This is where the transformation begins, as Jasmin describes it. There’s a lot of problem-solving that involves a meticulous examination of furniture with issues that a client may not have been aware of, according to Jasmin. Every single piece of furniture entails its own situation, and thus pricing is not uniform. The price is based on the time required in the workshop, overhead costs, materials, hardware, and eco-friendly strippers and solvents used by Found & Fixed.
“There’s a lot of satisfaction in seeing something in the before and after, in being able to make it into something brand-new,” as Jasmin cites the reimagining, refurbishment, and conversion of an old French door into a horizontal wall piece for pictures.
Porter came to co-creating the Found & Fixed business through her own experience of buying an 1860s home. “Crappy furniture” just wouldn’t fit in, as she says. One of her first furniture purchases was a hutch for $5 at a Habitat for Humanity ReStore, which she refurbished into an entirely new piece. It was more fun than sitting in Zoom meetings for her job, she says, and that motivated her to pursue a new, creative line of work. Porter’s experience became a template for a target audience: those who are purchasing their first home.
Quality is a key selling point of repurposing and preserving solid wood. Furniture that is purchased from national retailers is often made with medium-density fiberboard or hardboard and lasts far fewer years than solid wood, as Porter notes.
Found & Fixed’s team expresses a passion for participating in the circular economy in which they find ways to reuse, share, repair, refurbish and recover resources rather than waste and discard them. The latter essentially treats all objects as disposable. The services of Found & Fixed “speak to the problem we are trying to solve,” says Miller. “We don’t have to look for purpose.”
This value forms the foundation of Found & Fixed. It’s not just a culture of fashioning better material goods, but one aiming to be of lasting value to the community and the planet. As such, the original co-owners formed Found & Fixed as a worker cooperative in which there is shared decision-making and there is a pathway for everyone to become a co-owner. It has a team of seven. The co-owners credit Coop Hudson Valley and Seed Commons, which have provided a $300,000 investment and a program of training, business mentoring and rigorous evaluations of eight years of financial projections for the business.
As part of its outreach, Found & Fixed is doing workshops for others to learn skills in repair and reuse such as sessions on rewiring lamps, painting furniture and a traditional textile-mending technique known as Sashiko. Educating consumers is a foundational value. Miller was influenced by the Right-to-Repair Movement which advocates the right of consumers to repair their devices and items. “You can’t make that repair if you don’t know how,” she says. Repairability is crucial for the circular economy.
Good as New At the Repair Cafes
On a recent Saturday morning in February, dozens of people were seated at the Kingston Repair Café in the community area of the Clinton Avenue United Methodist Church at 122 Clinton Avenue. They have in tow a variety of possessions – small appliances such as a blender, articles of clothing, wooden objects, electronic gadgets and more. They waited patiently and chatted, holding their colored popsicle sticks which designate each of the varied categories of objects for repair such as wood, jewelry, zippers, clothing and textiles, digital and computers and mechanical and electrical. All around the room were stations for the different kinds of items to be repaired. It was a beehive of activity, busy and pleasant.
Simply put, Repair Cafes are regularly occurring events to fix things and connect people. Repair Café Hudson Valley is an umbrella non-profit organization for a network of Repair Cafes, including Kingston, Woodstock, New Paltz, Esopus, Rondout Valley, and Gardiner. As the organization notes on its website, Repair Cafes are free community events, “where you bring your beloved items and volunteer repair coaches help you fix them!” Over 75 percent of the items people bring to the events eventually get fixed. You can find where and when each of the upcoming repair events will be held by following Repair Café – Hudson Valley on Facebook.
The Repair Café concept was born in Amsterdam and a volunteer organizer, John Wackman, brought the idea to New Paltz in 2013. The sponsors of Repair Café Hudson Valley are Sustainable Hudson Valley and the Lower-Hudson Group of the Sierra Club Atlantic Chapter, and each community often has its own local sponsors.
Watching the recent Kingston Repair Café certainly attested to the stick-to-it, patient nature of the volunteers who restored a wide array of broken items and to the gathering’s social nature. At one table, a volunteer and coach, Bill Delozier, worked painstakingly on a small metal sculpture of a sailing yacht that held a lamp within its hull. A spiritual teacher had given the lamp to its owner and he held onto it for 10 years. Unfortunately, the lamp didn’t light. It was not an easy repair and took more than a few minutes. Ultimately, Delozier successfully rewired it and the lamp lit!
Every repair is a small yet significant victory over the frequent human tendency to buy something new rather than seek a fix for a broken object. “It saves the environment, as opposed to if you have a new chair and every time your chair gets wobbly, you throw it away,” says Steve Hirsch, a repair coach who was doing wood repairs that day. As a society, we do not encourage people sufficiently to repair and keep an item.
Moreover, finding repair places for household items and small appliances (just as one category) can be quite challenging. The list of the kinds of items that are repaired on the Repair Café Hudson Valley site is extensive and includes lamps, vacuums, clocks, chairs, electrical items, small appliances, digital devices, clothing and textiles, dolls, stuffed animals, tool sharpening, jewelry and more. This capability helps explain a gathering of more than 50 people around noon, awaiting aid with repairs during the four-hour Kingston Repair Café on Feb. 22. “It’s been really very busy,” says Martha Hill, who volunteers for the Kingston Repair Café and helps ensure the event runs smoothly. “People don’t know where to go to get things repaired.”
Many of those who come to the Repair Cafes are motivated by the promise of repairing an object, be it a treasured piece of jewelry or a relied-upon electronic device, for free. In addition, they often have a sense of community and something larger at stake. As Jake Straus, who is co-facilitator of the Kingston Repair Café (along with Melissa Iachetta), put it, “We’re building a community that is part of the circular economy.”
This is something people committed to a circular economy have in common. In each one of these hundreds of actions that add up to reusing, repairing, restoring and reimagining furniture, objects and yes, ultimately, homes and other buildings, people see a purpose and connection to sustaining our Earth.
As Gabriel Jasmin, the co-founder of Found & Fixed, says, he thinks about the tons and tons of furniture that gets dumped each year and he considers the ultimate possible detriment to his children. He finds it very worthwhile to work on a furniture piece that is “far gone” – though it still has good bones – and feels affirmed in restoring it and diverting it from a landfill. For Lo Miller, it’s a deep sense that objects have value. “It’s acknowledging the value of something that gets to live into the future,” Miller says. “Objects have value. If we have a sense of the value of objects, we will value people more.”
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