How these Berkley furniture restorers hope to win a DIY Heroes contest — and take home $25k
TAUNTON — Berkley-based Bostonian Repurposed got its start by rescuing an old garage window destined for the trash. Several years later the husband-and-wife DIY team of Dan and Kim Arena are in the running to be DIY Heroes.
“It pretty much all started with a window,” said Kim Arena.
A few years ago, while fixing up a previous home for sale, Kim says she asked her husband to save an old wooden window they removed from the garage. She wanted to make something with it, something from the old house to put in the new house.
“I said, ‘Don’t throw that away. I want to take it with us and make something with it.’”
Neither of them knew quite what she was talking about at the time, but years later the window — reimagined as a “home organization system” — still has a place in their home. The top half of the window is a chalkboard and the bottom half is a corkboard, for writing and posting notes, with shutters on each side for filing important papers.
“It’s still in our house, we still use it.”
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How Bostonian Repurposed came to be
Kim and Dan took on a few more projects, and it wasn’t long before family and friends were putting them to work.
“We had people asking if we could fix some things, like an old piece of furniture, or build them something with it. That’s how it all got started,” Kim said.
“And then people started asking us if this was something we did full time or if we were going to make it into something. So we sat down one night and asked ourselves, 'Is this a thing we can do, or want to do?' And it just kind of grew from there.”
Bostonian Repurposed was founded in 2016, offering furniture refinishing services and taking on projects for resale, all out of the garage of their home in Berkley. The garage is still home base and the business is a side hustle for both Kim and Dan. Kim, who toiled in social work for years, now works for Clockhouse Realty as a real estate agent, and Dan works for an insulation installation company.
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What is the DIY Hero Contest?
Recently, the Arenas have been focused on getting word out about their business as an entry in the DIY Hero Contest, which is sponsored by Barnwood Living and hosted by TV personality and craftsman Mark Bowe of Barnwood Builders on the Magnolia Network, and it’s been going better than they could have imagined.
Kim and Dan finished the previous round of voting in third place to advance to the final round, or top five. Currently, they’re in fourth place with voting set to end on April 7.
“When I first saw that we were in the running and in third place, I was like, ‘wait, what?’ I mean, I hate to think small, but we’re from little old Berkley, no one knows about us.”
The winner of the DIY Hero wins a top price of $25,000 and a feature in Make Magazine.
Arena says the contest is open to any do-it-yourselfer and the field includes jewelry and clothing makers and all varieties of craftspeople.
The contest, like the business, says Kim, is “a one-hundred percent shot in the dark.”
Before that first window fixer-upper project, Kim had no experiencing repurposing furniture and no carpentry skills to speak of. Dan had a background in carpentry and was willing to help.
“It was trial by fire to start. I taught myself what I could, but I knew nothing about carpentry at all.”
Dan went along for the ride, fully supportive and a helpful hand.
“He’s just like, sure, whatever, what’s next?” Kim says. “If I don’t know how to do something, or if I want to try something, he shows me what to do and we make it work.
“I feel like I’m the face of the business, but he’s right there by my side and very supportive.”
Kim says Bostonian Repurposed works one on one with clients and sells refurbished and recreated pieces via Facebook Marketplace and an online site. She says the only real limits are imagination and the willingness to give it a try.
She says a lot of older furniture pieces are good candidates for recreation and reuse.
“I see pieces from the '30s, '40s and '50s and right up through the '70s that are still good. When they say they don’t make it like they used to, that’s very true. But the old pieces can be fixed up and some of them will last forever.”
And Arena says they can take ordinary items that may have seen betters years and give them new life, and the client a new look.
Ladders become light fixtures, old industrial lockers a TV entertainment center; a wagon wheel given new life as a wreath or industrial-size wooden wire spools crafted into a table or wall clock. The options are endless and waiting to be sorted out.
It’s been an entirely unexpected turn in the road for both, but today Kim has the intention to go full-time when the time is right.
“The number one goal is a storefront and retail business, but I also have this vision of a workshop in the back where I can teach people to refinish furniture and fix things and help people with their own projects,” she said.
Taunton Daily Gazette staff writer Jon Haglof can be reached at jhaglof@tauntongazette.com. Support local journalism by purchasing a digital or print subscription to The Taunton Daily Gazette today.
This article originally appeared on The Taunton Daily Gazette: Berkley-based Bostonian Repurposed owners advance DIY Hero contest
