Todd Shiver brings life to reclaimed wood

ALBANY — The saying that one man’s trash is another man’s treasure is proven by the creations in Todd Shiver’s store, the Old Mill Furniture Shoppe, where he sells original pieces of handmade furniture made from reclaimed wood of old forgotten items.

Shiver founded the Old Mill Furniture Shoppe in Albany in 1994, but prior to opening the shop he worked in the restoration business and was the operations manager for Suburban Furniture for 12 years.

“I was in the restoration business prior to opening the shop,” Shiver said. “And so many people would bring in antiques to have them refurbished and transformed into something new, when it was actually just cheaper to build one.”

Shiver said that realization led the store’s owners to buy furniture and sell it out of the front of their store. When he was buying furniture, he came across imports from Indonesia that were made out of solid wood, and it sold very well. He found out where the solid wood was coming from and hopped on a plane to Indonesia on his first trip out of the country. He eventually set up a warehouse there, and he said it was then that he was kind of pushed into the furniture-making business.

“It got to the point where to control your product you had to control your own wood,” Shiver said. “We started manufacturing our own stuff just for Albany and the surrounding areas.”

Almost all of the products in the Old Mill indoor furniture line are designed by Shiver and handmade by a carpenter in his factory overseas. The pieces he creates are made from the wood of a variety of unique items he finds, including fishing boats, the floor of an old factory and pieces of wood from a train trestle from India. One of his most recent designs that proved to be really popular was a line of tables created from the wood of an old boat from Papua New Guinea.

“People love these pieces with a backstory,” Shiver said. “The ship came from Papua New Guinea. I put it on a freight, shipped it to Indonesia to create the tables, and by August they were sold out.”

Shiver said he mainly finds the materials to create his furniture by word of mouth from people he has met in the business over time. He found the ship he used to create the tables from a guy he met when de-assembling two small fishing boats he used for another piece.

“This guy knew that I bought boats and said that he had a cousin who worked in a boatyard who could find me a big boat,” Shiver said. “I flew out there, saw it and purchased it.”

Shiver said that he tries to avoid trends when creating his designs. He wants his pieces to be something nobody else has seen before and remain 100 percent his design.

“When a trend sells real well, everyone tends to copy each other,” the craftsman said. “So you will find pieces very similar to each other in each store, and that’s just not something I want to do.”

Since opening the Old Mill Furniture Shoppe, Shiver has expanded it to where he now has the Old Mill Cottage line, which he sells primarily wholesale at trade shows across the country. He’s also created a line of entirely outdoor furniture known as Fish Tales.

The Old Mill Furniture Shoppe was originally located in downtown Albany, but it quickly outgrew its location. Shiver said he was planning to switch to just selling wholesale, but he received so many calls asking where his store had gone, so he reopened in his current location.

“I was originally going to close Old Mill and just do wholesale, but people kept calling asking if I had any furniture and where my store had gone,” Shiver said. “So I opened back up over here.”

His store is now located at 905 20th Avenue in Albany, and his furniture lines are selling in stores across the country and now globally, with the recent products he shipped to China. Shiver said that he would eventually like to open another smaller boutique in Albany, where he could focus on selling his more artsy pieces.

Shiver said that the pieces he makes are built to last, and he wants to sell people that one special piece they are looking for, not a full matching set.

“We’ll greet you when you come in and then we let you fend for yourselves,” he said. “The customer knows what they are looking for, and we want them to feel like they can walk in and buy that one special piece.”

The Old Mill Furniture Shoppe is open from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.Mondays-Saturdays, and more information about the shop is available on the company’s Facebook page. For information on their furniture piece,s contact the shop at (229) 435-6002 or online at [email protected].

Old Mill CottageOld Mill College

Tessa Green

Tessa Green

Tessa Green

Tessa Green

Tessa Green

Tessa Green

Tessa Green

Tessa Green