Inspirational Up-cycling Project Offers Second Time Around to Furniture and People

Dave Lucas is sanding down an old pine church pew, painted, in rather poor eighties taste, with brash golden swirls. Dave is bringing the piece back to its beautiful original pale nutty wood ingrained with darker brown knots and whorls. “When it’s done, I might paint it, or just leave it natural and give it a coat of wax,” he says, gazing with pride at his workmanship. Dave, in his late fifties, has suffered from learning difficulties all his life and although he was well cared for at his local authority day service in Banbury, he found the routine of swimming trips, cooking sessions and arts and crafts “not very interesting”.

Then a miracle happened. One of his care workers, Nathan Wallis, found a discarded small cupboard, missing its door, during a clearout of the centre’s greenhouse. Having trained as a joiner-cabinet maker, Nathan, with the help of some of the centre’s users, fashioned a door for it using an old wooden chopping board. “One of the other members of staff saw it, and said ‘that’s lovely’ and promptly bought it,” says Nathan. “It was then that I realised we could turn the craft activities into something both rewarding and useful,” he says.

Some of the furniture on sale at Second Time Around’s shop

Now, the day centre users are working flat out on up-cycling old battered furniture: sanding, scrubbing, painting and waxing; fixing shaky legs and refreshing cabinet doors with mirrors or chicken wire. The look is shabby chic – with the emphasis on chic – the wood painted an elegant French grey or pale wheat colour, or simply left natural. From selling the odd piece to relatives or other care workers, the project has moved on to taking commissions from pub restaurants to private clients who want a much loved piece rescued and restored.

With the help of Oxfordshire County Council, the project has moved to a larger premises on the outskirts of Banbury, a hive of bustling activity as the craftspeople keep up with demand for the fashionable pale, distressed woodwork they specialise in. For Dave, the project has transformed his life. Every morning he is collected from his day centre to spend hours lovingly coaxing tired old pieces, bound for the bonfire or landfill, back to life. “It’s so much more worthwhile than what I was doing before,” he says. “I really look forward to coming here.” His patience and thoroughness, his care to follow the grain of the wood and move rhythmically on from coarse-grade to ever finer sand papers means even a complex spiralled jardinière emerges palely glowing from its ugly coats of dark lacquer.

It’s not entirely clear whether it is the furniture, or the people who restore it, who are getting their ‘Second Time Around’ – the project’s name – either way, there are plenty of second chances on offer here.

Even the volunteers are getting them. One volunteer, young John Tysoe, was all set for a career in the Royal Marines when he suffered a damaging bleed on his brain while out running, aged just 21. The damage left the otherwise fit and active young man unable to find a proper job, so he worked as a painter and decorator until his mother heard about the charity and he offered to volunteer a day a week. “I was always interested in antiques and old furniture,” he says. “I look at pieces made more than a hundred years ago and wonder what their story might be – who ate at that table, who sat on that chair. We have enormous fun here, we laugh, talk and keep each other company.”

The tools too, mostly donated from shed and garage clearouts are also enjoying a renaissance. “Because of the difficulties our users face, we only use hand tools as we don’t want anyone’s finger getting chopped off,” says Nathan. “Likewise the paints are all water-based so we don’t require white spirit to clean the brushes. A bottle of white spirit might look like a bottle of water to someone here. The result is, every piece is hand-crafted and uses natural paints and waxes.”

Although Oxfordshire County Council pays the supervisory care workers’ wages, the project needs to wash its face financially, which means it must clear £18,000 a year or more to pay for rent on the workshop and other costs. “We get a lot of donated paint, and wood off-cuts from a local sawmill but we need to keep selling our furniture so we can keep going. There are many more potential users of the project, but at the moment our places are full up,” says Nathan.

 

For more details visit https://www.facebook.com/pages/Second-Time-Around/375683522486881

The Cafes where you get a fix

It’s a scene straight out of Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock: heat is shimmering off the hot pebbles on the beach; young and old showing off their knees as they paddle in the sparkling green sea. In the cool of Saint George’s church, Kemp Town, just uphill from the crowded Front, groups of people are sitting at bright blue and white gingham-clad tables, frowns of concentration wrinkling their foreheads.

At one table piled with ribbons, skeins of wool and material remnants, two women are crocheting, delicate leaf patterns falling from their hooked implements. At another a jolly group of four are mending toys and repairing rips in cardigans. At a third, a man is soldering the back of a circuit board while in the background a pianist tinkles out a mixture of jazz and flamenco melodies.

Victoria Jackson shows a customer how to mend her leather bag

Welcome to Brighton Repair Café, where instead of drinking lattes, “customers” learn how to fix old and broken household items so they can be saved and re-used rather than thrown away. Part of a growing movement begun in the Netherlands, Repair Cafes are run by volunteers who pass on their skills for free, to try to help people get more out of their possessions. Today, Brighton mum Anastasia Mainwaring is learning how to crochet so she can patch up an old and much loved jumper. “I haven’t been able to wear it for six months because in places it has worn gossamer-thin,” she says. “I’m learning how to create fern-shaped leaves which I can then sew onto the worn patches and wear my favourite jumper again.”

Another “customer” Dan Hadley, a third year student at Brighton and Sussex Medical School, is learning how to solder so he can mend his computer speakers. “I did Design and Technology at school but didn’t learn anything really practical,” says Dan. “I know what the problem is, the part where the jack connects to the electrical wire is broken. I want to learn to repair it rather than just chuck it out.”

The Brighton Repair Café was founded by Masters Graduate Victoria Jackson and is one of twelve similar groups now operating across the country, from Chesterfield in the north, to Brighton and Bristol in the south. The ethos is simple: volunteer repairers with skills ranging from darning, to bicycle mechanics to carpentry and electrical work give their time for a few hours once a month. Repairees drop in, learn a new skill and give a small donation in return. The money is spent on tools and materials such as darning mushrooms and thread, but mostly on the huge variety of screw driver heads required to mend electrical appliances.

Volunteer electrician Mattia Cobianchi, who for his day job is an acoustic engineer, says that more than three quarters of the time it takes to mend a piece of electrical equipment is spent on opening it up. “Mass production of appliances has brought down quality meaning they break more easily, but the sealed unit process which relies on using lots of glue and specialised screw heads actually makes them harder to repair. Some basic items like toasters, which we get in all the time, have up to six or seven different types of screw in their structure and you need a really specialised tool kit to open them up. Consumers are almost encouraged to throw things away rather than try and mend them.”

Miriam and Mattia with the repaired lamp

As well as shoddy and hard-to-repair appliances, we seem to have lost skills such as darning and minor electrical work that a few generations earlier were part and parcel of education. One young couple Miriam and Juan Carlos Garcia have brought in a new bedside lamp. The problem, identified by Mattia in a matter of minutes, is a blown fuse. “I was quite surprised it was so easy to mend,” says Miriam. “It’s such a simple thing but I was never taught how to check and replace a blown fuse.”

Another customer Irenka Motyka has made do and mended all her life, and has brought a ripped cardigan for the companionship rather than the need to learn a skill. “My parents fled Poland in the Second World War and for the first five years of my life I lived in a refugee camp in Oxfordshire,” she says. “We had nothing, so everything was patched and mended. It’s nice people want to learn these skills again.”

As for me, I learned “Swiss darning”, a way of strengthening knitwear before it gives way, to repair my jumpers. Also, thanks to design lecturer Sam Jarman who helps out with a range of practical repairs, I fixed my beloved but battered stove-top coffee machine whose rubber seal had disintegrated. It’s now good for another ten years.

For details of your nearest Repair café, and how to start one visit www.repaircafe.org