A full year of rustic furniture and décor from RustiK Rehab Design
Getting to wake up and design, create and build custom rustic furniture from reclaimed materials is something that we don’t take for granted. In the grand scheme of everything going on in today’s world, 1 year barely seems relevant. Having the ability to write this article for RustiK Rehab’s 1 year anniversary is a blessing. The cliché approach to something like this would be to take a walk down ‘Memory Lane’……and that’s exactly what I’m going to do.
RustiK Rehab Design technically started with a rustic wine rack, which we still have hanging in our home as a reminder of where everything started and a cool display for our wine bottles. That quickly led to inquiries from friends for items like coffee tables and end tables.
As soon as we got a few tables under our belt, it was time to put some thought, sweat, sacrifice and passion behind this crazy idea. This crazy idea meant leaving a full time job at 27 years old and potentially putting a brand new marriage in a position of stress and struggle. This was always on my mind but if you ask my entire family and close friends, they always had my back and told me to go for it 100% or don’t do it at all. So, we dove head first into a 2’ deep pool.
Designing and building was the easy part to get started. Developing a business plan, finding and salvaging reclaimed materials, finding time for marketing, bookkeeping, networking, developing relationships and partners and all the other aspects that went into this ‘crazy idea’ were learned on the fly. Some things worked the first time, most things didn’t.
Opening your mind and eyes to learn from everything you experience is the best ‘How-To’ book for anything. Every morning we wake up with the mentality, “how can we build RustiK a little bit today?” (excuse the pun).
In 1 full year we have had the pleasure, and learning experiences to design and build over 70 different orders. That’s not even the number of pieces made, just the orders placed. Each piece had its difficulties, unique characteristics and one of a kind look. Building a farm table with the same dimensions and specs may seem repetitive and mindless. The beauty and most exciting part of what we do is seeing how the story and history of the material changes the dynamics of each piece.
Looking back over this year we have gotten to build a variety of pieces for a variety of people: farm tables, coffee tables, bars, high top tables, pub tables, wedding gifts, wall hangings, barn doors, closet doors, restaurant tables, restaurant wall paneling, built-in cabinetry, wine barrel pub table, wine racks, headboards, kitchen islands, fireplace mantels, hockey stick tables, shelving, desks, foyer hall tree and storage, TV entertainment units, cutting boards, ‘cornhole’ sets and a whole lot of memories all from different materials.
We take pride in using materials and lumber that are local with stories or history behind them. We used lumber from a number of local barns hand built by our pioneer ancestors. Salvaged live edge lumber that was dragged from the woods after a hurricane and milled down. Turn of the century hand forged iron hardware. Salvaged floor boards from early 1900’s houses. Wooden hockey sticks. Who knows, maybe the material we’ve used in this year would have been saved or used for something else. But we got to it first and saved it from slowly rotting away or filling a landfill. Taking the old and bringing it back to life is gratifying and keeps us waking up every morning to try and be better and turn RustiK into a local and sought after company and fixture in the community
As we go into the Fall season and you start looking around your home or business, please keep us in mind and feel free to reach out with any idea or question about a custom piece. Tell your friends, follow us on Facebook and Instagram and keep spreading the word. There is no doubt in my mind that we would be in this position that we are today without each of you. Whether you have a RustiK piece, have told a friend about us or have just listened to what we do and have kept us in mind for when the time comes; Thank you all.
Here’s to another year!
