If you’ve been following Taylor Ahn on Instagram (@new_iterations), like I have for a while, you’re at once impressed, inspired, and…a little grossed out. Her current project, an antique card catalog, started as a grimy habitat for a colony of stink bugs. She spent hours ridding the piece of its occupants and rebuilding the frame. When she finishes, she expects it will be her favorite project to date.
“I call it my passion project, because the amount of damage it had required me to tear it down to the studs and basically rebuild it from scratch,” Ahn says. “But the piece is so cool and has so much potential. It just needed somebody to invest the time and work to get it back to its former glory.”
Investing time and work is the name of the game and Ahn, who is a full-time graphic designer and woodworking hobbyist, has spent the last six years honing her skills (and 70+ hours fixing up that card catalog). We asked her to tell us more about her work, the industry, and her biggest success story to date.
Abode: How did you get into woodworking?
Taylor Ahn: I learned the basics from shadowing my husband (and, honestly, YouTube). Our “workshop” was a friend’s garage they graciously let us use in exchange for free rein of our tools. Like many people who get interested in furniture, my motivation was that my IKEA dresser disintegrated in my hands during a move. I was tired of spending money on short-term pieces made of MDF and particle board. I started visiting local lumber yards and asking a lot of questions, and from there I learned how to plane rough lumber and work with slabs so we could build our own furniture. It wasn’t until a few years later that I started getting into refinishing existing furniture. That part of my hobby took off after we moved into our first house. Not only did we have an empty house to fill, but we had a garage big enough to store the furniture I wanted to work on. I already had most of the tools and background knowledge I needed to start refinishing, so I just dove in head first.
How would you describe what you do? It seems like kind of a mix.
I have always been teetering at the intersection of woodworking, restoring, and refinishing. I do feel like lately I have been gravitating more towards refinishing. Especially with custom pieces, when people are given the choice, they would rather make a piece their own style and aesthetic rather than completely restore the existing look. I think there is a balance of preserving the charm of an older piece while giving it new life. I have painted as many pieces as I have restored to natural wood; it all comes down to personal preference and the sentimental value of a piece.
How does your commission work…work?
Honestly, I’m still figuring that part out. I’m very lucky to have had a lot of requests come in for custom pieces. Currently, I’m focused on refinishing and clearing out the inventory I’ve collected thus far. However, once I finish that I’d definitely be happy to sprinkle in custom or commissioned pieces. So far, any commissioned pieces I’ve done were from my own inventory. What I usually do is post a “before” of a piece I just picked up, and if I don’t have a specific vision for it I’ll say it is “available for customization,” so at that point whoever messages me first has dibs. I’ve had great luck with clients thus far when it comes to giving me creative freedom.
What’s it like to be a female woodworker?
While woodworking is considered a male-dominated space, I have found that the refinishing community (at least on Instagram) is predominately women, and it has been really awesome to see the amount of empowerment in that community. I’d love to see more female refinishers transition into the woodworking space too. There is just so much talent there. I know for myself, it makes a huge difference when I see another woman doing something I’ve always been nervous to try. I would love to be that person for someone else, to demystify a certain project or skill and encourage other people to try it themselves. Even though I am working alone, it never feels that way because I always have people responding to the stories I post and asking questions. That is my favorite part, interacting with other people and sharing what I know. We all start somewhere, so I’m more than happy to pass that knowledge along and build other people’s confidence to try refinishing their own pieces.
QUICK FIRE
Greatest challenge: An antique oak dresser with a lot of curves that I had to re-veneer. It had seven drawers and a hat cabinet door (different sizes and shapes), all of which I had to remove the original veneer and re-veneer without any “professional” tools like a press.
Biggest blunder:
I paid $175 and drove two hours for a dresser I had high hopes for (based on a grainy picture on Facebook Marketplace), just to bring it home to realize it was MDF under veneer and reeked of cigarettes. I ended up giving it away for free, lesson learned.
Greatest success: An Instagram reel I made about a recent project went viral. I didn’t think it was an impressive video at all—it was like five seconds long and showed me prepping and painting an oak dresser. But I guess short and sweet is what the people want.
