Chapter One
Two Sisters,
a Folding Table,
and a Lot of Old Stuff.
Dawn and Rene are sisters — the actual kind, raised in the same Northeast Ohio house, fighting over the same hand-me-downs. Eleven thousand miles of estate sales later, plenty of late nights in a shared garage with a belt sander, and one ill-advised decision involving a chartreuse settee, they’re still at it.
How it started
A walnut buffet nobody else wanted.
It was a Saturday morning estate sale in Cleveland Heights, the kind where the coffee’s already cold and someone’s argued with the cashier twice. Dawn spotted a 1948 walnut buffet pushed against the back wall — nicked, missing one drawer pull, and tagged at fifteen dollars because nobody had room for it.
Rene happened to walk by. They got it home in the back of a Subaru Outback (barely), spent two weekends with sandpaper and tung oil, and sold it on the front lawn for two hundred. That was the first one.
What we actually do
Two sets of hands, one philosophy: keep the patina, fix the broken thing, leave the story alone.
Dawn’s side
Sanding, stripping, refinishing.
- Furniture from the ‘30s through the ‘70s, mostly Ohio-made.
- Hand oils, hand waxes, hand brushes. No spray rigs.
- The scratches stay if the scratches have something to say.
Rene’s side
Stitching, mending, reupholstering.
- Linens, quilts, and the occasional barkcloth curtain.
- A 1962 Pfaff that’s outlasted three of her cars.
- Buttons get re-covered. Cushions get re-stuffed. Rules.
“Somebody made this once, and somebody loved it once, and we’re just the people in the middle making sure it gets to the next somebody.”
Dawn, in a parking lot, drinking coffee out of a pickle jar
Where it comes from
Estate sales, basements, and the alley.
Most weekends from April through October, you’ll find Dawn and Rene parked outside an estate sale at 7:48am, twelve minutes before the doors open, with a Thermos and a list.
Tremont, Ohio City, Lakewood, Shaker Heights, Cleveland Heights, the Cuyahoga Valley, and one extremely productive run through Akron last summer. They’ll go anywhere within an hour of I-77 if a friend tips them off.
The alley behind a duplex in Old Brooklyn produced a hand-stenciled toy chest last fall. We’re still not over it.
Whatever they find, they sand it, stitch it, oil it, mend it — and then they take it all to their booth at Shops by the Lake in Painesville.
Come see what we’ve found.
The booth is in Painesville and the mall is open Thursday through Sunday. Feel free to say hi before you drive up — we like knowing who’s coming.