By : Caroline Morris
Do either of you have a background with restoration ?
Hara : We both love old stuff , we love being able to restore anything we find . Some people have an eye for fashion , we have an eye for trash . We look at stuff and see what it could be .
Daniel : I can ’ t even count the amount of stuff that we have bought or found and fixed up .
Hara : All of our pieces are random , we never know what we are going to find . We don ’ t have a certain theme . It ’ s just whatever we see in a piece .
Do you guys just go all around Pensacola looking for pieces ?
Hara : Actually , most of the trash picking we do is on our routes . With the kids , there ’ s a lot of driving back and forth so everywhere we go , we try to take a different road or a different route
Daniel : Sometimes its just a drive-by . That ’ s all you need to see if a piece is worth picking up . And we say trash , but it ’ s all sitting by the side of the road , it ’ s not like we are digging through trash or dumpster diving .
Hara : Obviously we can ’ t just pick everything . It has to be a piece with good bones . Not everything is worth picking up .
Daniel : It has to be real wood . If you pick something that you have to tear apart , you just get lost in it and it ’ s so hard to finish .
Hara , I know that you have an artistic background with your photography , but how about you Daniel ? Daniel : Yeah , I ’ m a mechanic so I work with my hands all the time . Hara : He ’ s really good with the critical thinking . Obviously he ’ s very artistic too , but he ’ s great with the logistics . If we really need to make something happen with a piece , he can always figure out how to get it done .
Hara : Yeah you can ’ t always trust someone to be as passionate about something as you .
Daniel : I also think it ’ s kinda cool to just have a Mom and Pop store instead of Wal-Mart . That ’ s the cool thing about Pensacola . Coming from a place like Ft . Walton Beach where everything is so commercialized , with Joe ’ s Crab Shack and chain restaurants , to a place like Pensacola where there are 20 different restaurants you would never know about unless you lived here , you see that something doesn ’ t have to be huge to be your favorite .
Will you guys be taking custom orders at all ?
Hara : I think we will have a wish-list where people can say “ I ’ m looking for something like this , if you find it let me know .” But we honestly never know what we will find .
What would you like people to know about your pieces ?
Hara : We make sure that everything is completely cleaned and completely restored . We make sure there is nothing like mold growing inside or anything harmful , we have a complete disinfecting process . Everything is 100 % restored and built to last .
Daniel : We don ’ t cut any corners in our processes and we use the highest quality material for all of our pieces .
Hara : When we started talking about turning this into a business , we knew it would be a great way to work together and use our hands and hopefully spread a little love in the process .
What if your demand gets really high ? Will that be hard with just the two of you working on pieces ? Hara : That ’ s a hard thing to say . Daniel : It ’ s kind of like a labor of love . How could we trust someone to put as much into the pieces as we do ? We put everything into each project . It ’ s not like she ’ s working on one thing and I ’ m working on another . We put all of ourselves into one piece until it ’ s done .
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