Business Brings New Life to Old Furniture
Business Brings New Life to Old Furniture
Pumpkin Hollow Furniture Restores Old Pieces Through Repair and Reupholstery
Photo / Pumpkin Hollow Furniture
Single-use, disposable, easily replaceable products make it so much more tempting to just “buy a new one,” rather than repair the thing that isn’t quite working or is showing signs of age. But to Mark Bukowiecki, “Anything can be fixed,” and it’s this philosophy that inspired his business, Pumpkin Hollow Furniture. In fact, “The worse it comes to me, the better it looks to me in the end.”
Located at his home on Pumpkin Hollow Road in Humphrey, Bukowiecki’s business is the result of many years of experience in carpentry and furniture repair. “In 2006, we moved here from Buffalo,” he explained. “My wife was teaching, and I started getting into carpentry. I became a carpenter with a couple of local contractors in Ellicottville.” In 2008 when the recession slowed down the economy, Bukowiecki responded to Raymour & Flanigan’s newspaper ad for a furniture repairman. “I said, ‘I think my skills will transfer over,’ and I ended up working there for 10 years,” he said.
Although he worked primarily out of the Olean Raymour & Flanigan, Bukowiecki did service work throughout western New York and northwestern Pennsylvania. “It was a lot of driving, but I really got to know the area and gained a lot of experience repairing furniture,” he noted. Although primarily self-taught, he received a significant amount of training at Raymour & Flanigan and has been mentored for many years by an upholsterer in Olean, Tim Spiller. Now, Bukowiecki is the furniture repairman for Bear Mountain Furniture in Great Valley.
While there are fewer repair people now than there used to be, “There are definitely people still doing it, but I think it’s directly reflective of the throw-away mentality,” he explained. “Every industry across the board is making the life of the product less and less so that we come back more and more to replace it; we’ve become conditioned.”
After several years on the road driving to repair jobs, Bukowiecki is happy that much of his work allows him to spend time around the people whom he loves most. “While the heart of my purpose is to be around my family, perhaps the spark that started my path to creating my own business was designing and building my own sectional sofa,” he said. “After years of seeing some common and repeat issues with modern furniture design, I knew I could add my touch to bypass as much as possible.”
Even those products with a “limited lifetime warranty,” which is the expected life of the product, are only built to sit in someone’s home for approximately seven years, said Bukowiecki. Furniture made with mass-produced upholstery materials and particle board framing assembled with glue and two-inch framing staples “can be made better than originally designed with the right kind of repairs,” he explained. “If that piece finds the wrong action, it will pop apart,” said Bukowiecki. “But if I can put it together with an angle bracket and screws, the hold is better by some magnitude. Even reupholstering something with higher quality fabric makes such a difference.”
In fact, repairs and reupholstery are the most common jobs Pumpkin Hollow Furniture does. One of Bukowiecki’s favorite projects involved a chair given to him by a friend several years before. “I had it outside, kicking around in the weather for a couple of years before I even touched it,” he recalled. “I call it the ‘nightmare chair,’ because it was a bane for me—for awhile!” Now the chair, which could have been destined for the dump, is a beautiful furnishing in Bukowiecki’s home. “The fact that it’s comfortable—that’s the cherry right on top,” he said.
Even the most challenging projects are rewarding for Bukowiecki, for that’s where he’s learned the most. “Pulling staples is probably the least fun part of it, but you learn so much,” he noted. “You learn how to apply your body, the physics of it—even when you jab yourself, you learn so much about technique!”
While Bukowiecki has involved all three of his children in his work, his daughter Nola is the one who seems most drawn to it. “I have two boys and one girl, and she (Nola) is the one that comes with me more often than not,” he said. “She’s really artistic, very good with drawing, and definitely got the eye.”
For more examples of Bukowiecki’s work, follow Pumpkin Hollow Furniture on Facebook. He can be contacted by phone at 716-604-6426 or email at pumpkinhollowfurniture@gmail.com.