Love turns trash to treasure
By Sydney Kornegay
Cub@TheColumbiaStar.com

Harold Reed refinishes a piece of furniture he found in a trash pile.

With chipped paint and a cracked seat, the old rocking chair seemed useless. But when Harold Reed spotted it on his neighbor's trash pile, he scooped it up, took it home, and started working. In a couple of days, the piece of furniture was as good as new.

The chair, which now sits in Reed's living room, is just one of many discarded items that he has restored. Reed uses his love for fixing items to help repair broken furniture as a favor to friends, strangers, and even unsuspecting neighbors.

"I love taking apart (a broken item), putting it back together, and seeing it work again," said Reed, a former automobile mechanic who first started fixing furniture 20 years ago as a side hobby.

Now, Reed has turned his hobby into a service to others. He often fixes his friends' and fellow church members' furniture for free, though they offer to pay him.

"I just do it because it's a lot of fun," Reed says. "I like to use it as a form of ministry."

Other times, Reed uses his talent in random acts of kindness. Once, for instance, Reed took a chair from a neighborhood trash pile, repaired it, and returned it to its unsuspecting owner.

"They were pretty surprised to have a chair that they threw away returned to them," he laughed.

Reed's most recent project was restoring a table to help furnish a home for a missionary family. Now, he's looking for chairs that have been thrown out to go with it. Reed is living proof of the saying: "One man's trash is another man's treasure."