Tips to Give Furniture a Second Life

When friends Lauren Zimmerman and Nick Siemaska first met, one can imagine their conversation was peppered with words like, "good bones" and "rehab." If you guessed aspiring medical students, you'd be wrong.

No, the Boston twenty-somethings are a couple of furniture restoration buffs. They discovered a mutual love of restoring old, often discarded, furniture to new, polished gems that's taken them from hobbyists to bloggers to soon-to-be catalog and online store. For Siemaska, 25, it started from practicality. A student and musician, he wanted to improve his place but needed to do so on the cheap.

"I didn't have any experience with it. I did it with the furniture I had already. I had a desk, a table, all unfinished wood furniture, very basic stuff," he says.

For budding restorers, many of Siemaska's tips come from personal experience.