Looking around my workshop, I see the base of an old metal-stamping machine, its two U-shaped plates waiting (begging) to be turned into a desk. And there’s a high-top table, a standard variety that once held a place in most classrooms. This one’s at least 70 years old and it’s especially sturdy, so I’m going to make it into a dining table and give it a second life.
 
I learned to be resourceful when I was kid. We didn’t have much aside from know-how. My dad built stuff, and then he left a whole bunch of tools behind. Even before I was allowed to use them, I knew how things should come together. Then and now, I see every step in vivid detail. It was never the ideas that hung me up; it was the focusing on them.
 
These days, the recycled furniture is a reprieve from my original work. It’s cheaper and faster to make—that desk would take about a third of the time an original one would—and it can be a lot more fun. Much of designing original furniture is problem solving. And as much as I pride myself on my ability, when you’re starting almost every day for several months at a time with a dilemma, it can wear you down. Building recycled furniture is a stark contrast to all of that. For me, it can come so naturally, it’s like I’m letting the object dictate the direction.
 
That said, I still struggle with being known as a guy who makes recycled furniture, as I think most original furniture designers would. Which is why you won’t come across many who do both. Popular as recycling and refurbishing have become, neither’s viewed as a genuine craft. (You can thank reality TV, in large part, for that.) Is it elitist? Sure. But it’s also a natural reaction by a thoroughly-trained field to a largely DIY movement encroaching on its reputation and customer base.
 
I like to think, though, that I distinguish myself. My recycled furniture is not necessarily what you’re exposed to. The object I start with is barely recognizable in the end. My aim is not to elaborate or accentuate that original design. It’s to build a wholly new, polished design from a few extraordinary elements.
 
On the days when I’m lost in the middle of a piece of original furniture, too far from the beginning to retreat and too far from the finish to find a second wind, the promise of those recycled tables, and desks, and cabinets is my salvation. They’re what remind me that I’m more than any one piece of furniture, which can be surprisingly easy to forget when I’m creating original work.

Someone asked me to explain my hoarding a couple weeks back.
 
“Collecting,” I corrected him.
 
“What?”
 
“It’s collecting, not hoarding,” I said.
 
“Right. Of course. You make recycled furniture, too.”
 
I know that five 40-foot shipping containers filled with one guy’s assorted odds and ends and situated nowhere near a shipping yard would normally signal a problem, but I’m on top of it.
 
For starters, I know where everything is. Mostly. In one, I’m storing these massive elevator gears that have a diameter of, like, six or seven feet. Shortly, they’re going to become the base for a glass-top table. And you thought recycled furniture was an uncomfortable chair made out of a shipping crate and a burlap throw pillow.
 
For another, this stuff finds me. I don’t go looking for it. Squatting in my workshop right now is an old, industrial-looking work cart that I’m going to convert into a polished, industrial-looking kitchen island. I found it along the side of the road on my way to Princeton. I’m known to lever just about anything into the bed of my pickup, but this cart almost ended my reputation, and me, right then and there. It’s gotta weigh close to 300 pounds. We wrestled on the shoulder for longer than I care to admit until finally, mercifully, it tipped into place.
 
Most of the rest, I stumbled over (almost literally in a lot of cases) during clean-outs. Friends, or friends of friends, or even perfect strangers who’ve heard I have an eye for certain, rare (if forgotten) things and room to spare grant me first dibs when they’re clearing out their barns, attics, basements, garages, backyards, and shops.
 
When I first started making furniture, a little more than a decade ago now, I would make it all out of stuff I found because it was cheaper that way. At one point, it felt like all I was doing were these clean-outs, just building my inventory. Now, the things that fill my containers feel more like ideas-in-waiting.
 
I like to think that making recycled furniture is a break from the grind of designing original pieces. It gets me back in touch with what pulled me into this and filled me with the confidence to believe that I could design and make my own original furniture. But, really, I’m compelled to do it. Something’s always snagging my attention. From there, it’s a fast romance; I can’t help but reimagine it.

Suddenly, those five shipping containers seem like some serious restraint, right?