Pam Hartz Miller says her family made fun of her when she took an old seed cabinet from the family hardware store that her father ran in Deposit, New York.
The store, Ed Hartz and Sons, has been in the family for five generations, and the seed cabinet was a wreck.
"The backs of the drawers were chewed up from mice, and it was painted a mustard gold," she says.
Hartz Miller and her husband, Jim Miller, transformed the oak cabinet, with its slanted bank of windowed drawers, into a distinctive kitchen island.
Her family isn't teasing her anymore. "Now they all want it!"
Hartz Miller, who once designed window displays at the hardware store, sees new identities hidden in cast off items, flea market buys and roadside finds - second careers for old furniture.
She created an unusual settee from an old bed with a spool-style headboard.
"It really wasn't that sturdy as a bed," Hartz Miller says.
Her husband transformed another spool bed into a desk for their sons' bedroom.
Jim Miller remembers his grandmother making cookies at the old Hoosier baking cabinet that's now in their kitchen.
It has a built-in flour sifter, original instructions on weights and measures and a deep bread drawer.
But these days, the cupboard is a wine cabinet.
In the same vein, an old typesetters' drawer serves as a coffee table, and Hartz Miller transformed a CD rack made from dowels into a hand-stencilled display rack for the quilts she makes.
Hartz Miller has woven pillows from neckties, framed a mirror with a Victrola cover and turned discarded wooden shutters plus the armrests of a broken rocking chair into a one-of-a-kind headboard.
The base of an unusual table lamp she and her husband made is encircled with antique thread bobbins.
Sometimes Jim has to "temper me", Hartz Miller says.
"He'll say, `This is something you found by the side of the road. Why are you putting so much time into it?'."
She smiles. It's her nature.
An old chamber pot works for a houseplant. An antique shoe form makes a charming candleholder.
And she's a big proponent of grouping a collection rather than scattering it around the house, piecemeal.
"For me, I think you see it better when it's all together."
