Posted by Snow in
Furniture Medic
This sign caught my eye and I thought it was an excellent way to bring re-use into a topical conversation. What if you really could call a furniture medic? What if when the Kool-Aid hit the fan, or grandmother’s breakfront, or the extra hickory barbecue sauce on the blond wood of the ancient hope chest, you could call someone? What if there was a children’s rate? They would have made a fortune at my house when my brothers played football around the house, weaving around Mom’s heirlooms.
Fixing furniture makes much more sense than the time-honored standard of most consumer households, especially throughout the 1980’s. If it was broke, throw it out. If it didn’t have that newness gleam and form, it had no value or was banished to attic oblivion. Our ancestors understood about furniture re-use. That’s why antiques bring millions of dollars at auction worldwide due to craftsmanship and artisan skills rendering furniture that lasts over 600 years
The furniture medic seems like he would smell like pine and maple, but wear entirely organic clothing. A caped crusader of the Furniture world, sponsored by Formby’s.
I remember watching the Formby show. Formby furniture polish deserves brand loyalty. That guy knew everything about how to save furniture. You might say furniture was his bread and butter. This was a pre-Roadshow era of furniture preservation. While the emphasis is on preserving the value, the re-use of what might be otherwise thrown out and hitting the dump is significant as well.
I remember he spoke about hitting a stain of some kind of rubber, gum, or oil that had formed a gummy buildup. The answer was not to scrub. What a complex, yet ordinary wisdom that is. But as I wrote this, I wondered what Formby’s inimitable polish was made out of. Was it a toxic solvent? Was it wholly green? I had to find out. These days you get to find out what kinds of stuff go in the polish.
I wondered what kinds of skills one might need when applying for the job of furniture medic. Was physical fitness involved? How do you rate the blood pressure of a chest of drawers? Are emergency injections of wood sap or glue gum necessary? How does glue play into the whole scenario? What are the allowable glue standards?
Furthermore, how does the billing work? The furniture medic metaphor was an imaginative one. Who are the major vendors of the furniture HMO world? Is hardware included in the quote? Does it work like Triple AAA, they tow the crumpled Chippendale past the unhappy stares of veneered wood cabinets? How many visits until the patient is considered a terminal risk?
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