Grand Opening This Weekend for College Student's Antique Store
July 28, 2016 at 4:25 p.m.
By Jordan Fouts-
The Warsaw resident and Indiana Wesleyan student opened Kelsea Designs at 105 W. Market St., Pierceton, in July to sell her refurbished and repurposed furniture and light fixtures. She’ll have a grand-opening weekend Friday and Saturday to welcome past clients and show off the space to prospective new ones.
Her store offers a mix of her own work – dressers, chairs, buffets and end-tables bought or brought in shabby shape and given new life – and the more common antique wares Pierceton is known for. It’s open Tuesday through Saturday, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., and Sunday from 2 to 7 p.m.
“Basically, everything in here I’ve in some way, shape or form doctored it (or) fixed, past just washing it off,” she said Wednesday in her shop, sitting at a vintage robin-egg blue dining set. Overhead hangs a ribbed metal washtub hammered into a hanging light. “I like to experiment and work with things you might not think could be a lamp.”
She described how she bought the tub with a rusted-out bottom, reshaped it and fitted it with a bulb. She pointed out other items fashioned into light fixtures: over there, an old cricket cage hanging from a bedspring strung with lights; here, something that might have been a cake tin once; and there, an old flour sifter, the hand-crank functioning as the on-off switch. A green enameled washing machine tub she made into a lamp was bought and hung in a house featured in a Fort Wayne tour of homes.
“I try to buy things that are broken, highly water damaged or unappealing in some way – something out of style, with black-flecked paint, kind of nasty – and take it apart and make something else,” she said, also noting that whether she restores or repurposes a piece depends on the age and condition. “I just have an appreciation for old stuff, even if it’s not ‘nice’ as it is.”
Antique restoration is a hobby that quickly turned into a business, prompting her to change majors, from interior design to business, halfway through college. She decided to pursue an associate’s instead of a four-year degree around the time the building became available, and ultimately jumped ahead 50 years to her retirement plan.
“This is what my end goal always was,” she said, explaining that she realized at the end of high school she wanted to run her own business, maybe after establishing herself as an interior designer. “It was something in the back of my mind but I didn’t think it was possible – I thought it would take my life savings, or mean getting a loan or something.”
But after looking into it and realizing it was doable, she asked her parents to direct the support they were going to give her for college toward the business instead.
She had already been selling at craft shows in the area for four years, after starting to fix antique furniture for herself. She said she realized at one point, as it became a business, that she needed to sell what she made since she could always make something else for herself.
McDonald struggles to remember what exactly the first piece she fixed up was, but thinks it was probably the bed she wanted to weld into a bench. She earned her skills through years of award-winning woodworking in 4-H and lessons from her dad, Scott McDonald, a contractor. They shared an increasingly cramped workshop at their 1860s farmhouse, which her family has slowly been restoring all her life, until she moved into the Pierceton building.
Her merchandise fills the front half; in back, a workshop where she sands and paints, and a storage room crammed with dressers, cabinets and odds and ends. About 60 chairs hang from the ceiling, stretching from one end of the room to the other, waiting to be worked on.
Upstairs are two apartments, and while she said having tenants helps cover the cost of the building, she was terrified at first of being a landlord. She said her fears turned out to be unfounded.
She also found that living on the budget of a small-business owner requires some sacrifices, both in her personal budget and her time. An average week in the summer might see her spending one day buying antiques and five or six days restoring and selling. How many projects she’s working on at any time depends on the size of the pieces; she has six going on now.
“I mainly do the work myself. I ask my dad for advice sometimes, but I try to do it myself, I’m fairly motivated,” she said, adding that she’s controlling in the sense that she knows what she wants to do. “Dad tells me what I need to do so I know how to do future stuff, then I can combine ideas to make it work.”
But when it comes to customers, she said, “My customer knows a heck of a lot better than I know about what they want. I try to do some upselling, but I don’t push. If it doesn’t go with their house, they know they don’t need it. I don’t want them to take something of mine home and hate it.”[[In-content Ad]]
The Warsaw resident and Indiana Wesleyan student opened Kelsea Designs at 105 W. Market St., Pierceton, in July to sell her refurbished and repurposed furniture and light fixtures. She’ll have a grand-opening weekend Friday and Saturday to welcome past clients and show off the space to prospective new ones.
Her store offers a mix of her own work – dressers, chairs, buffets and end-tables bought or brought in shabby shape and given new life – and the more common antique wares Pierceton is known for. It’s open Tuesday through Saturday, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., and Sunday from 2 to 7 p.m.
“Basically, everything in here I’ve in some way, shape or form doctored it (or) fixed, past just washing it off,” she said Wednesday in her shop, sitting at a vintage robin-egg blue dining set. Overhead hangs a ribbed metal washtub hammered into a hanging light. “I like to experiment and work with things you might not think could be a lamp.”
She described how she bought the tub with a rusted-out bottom, reshaped it and fitted it with a bulb. She pointed out other items fashioned into light fixtures: over there, an old cricket cage hanging from a bedspring strung with lights; here, something that might have been a cake tin once; and there, an old flour sifter, the hand-crank functioning as the on-off switch. A green enameled washing machine tub she made into a lamp was bought and hung in a house featured in a Fort Wayne tour of homes.
“I try to buy things that are broken, highly water damaged or unappealing in some way – something out of style, with black-flecked paint, kind of nasty – and take it apart and make something else,” she said, also noting that whether she restores or repurposes a piece depends on the age and condition. “I just have an appreciation for old stuff, even if it’s not ‘nice’ as it is.”
Antique restoration is a hobby that quickly turned into a business, prompting her to change majors, from interior design to business, halfway through college. She decided to pursue an associate’s instead of a four-year degree around the time the building became available, and ultimately jumped ahead 50 years to her retirement plan.
“This is what my end goal always was,” she said, explaining that she realized at the end of high school she wanted to run her own business, maybe after establishing herself as an interior designer. “It was something in the back of my mind but I didn’t think it was possible – I thought it would take my life savings, or mean getting a loan or something.”
But after looking into it and realizing it was doable, she asked her parents to direct the support they were going to give her for college toward the business instead.
She had already been selling at craft shows in the area for four years, after starting to fix antique furniture for herself. She said she realized at one point, as it became a business, that she needed to sell what she made since she could always make something else for herself.
McDonald struggles to remember what exactly the first piece she fixed up was, but thinks it was probably the bed she wanted to weld into a bench. She earned her skills through years of award-winning woodworking in 4-H and lessons from her dad, Scott McDonald, a contractor. They shared an increasingly cramped workshop at their 1860s farmhouse, which her family has slowly been restoring all her life, until she moved into the Pierceton building.
Her merchandise fills the front half; in back, a workshop where she sands and paints, and a storage room crammed with dressers, cabinets and odds and ends. About 60 chairs hang from the ceiling, stretching from one end of the room to the other, waiting to be worked on.
Upstairs are two apartments, and while she said having tenants helps cover the cost of the building, she was terrified at first of being a landlord. She said her fears turned out to be unfounded.
She also found that living on the budget of a small-business owner requires some sacrifices, both in her personal budget and her time. An average week in the summer might see her spending one day buying antiques and five or six days restoring and selling. How many projects she’s working on at any time depends on the size of the pieces; she has six going on now.
“I mainly do the work myself. I ask my dad for advice sometimes, but I try to do it myself, I’m fairly motivated,” she said, adding that she’s controlling in the sense that she knows what she wants to do. “Dad tells me what I need to do so I know how to do future stuff, then I can combine ideas to make it work.”
But when it comes to customers, she said, “My customer knows a heck of a lot better than I know about what they want. I try to do some upselling, but I don’t push. If it doesn’t go with their house, they know they don’t need it. I don’t want them to take something of mine home and hate it.”[[In-content Ad]]
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