Tennessee Living

One look around Kerry Lee’s Whites Creek home reveals a lot about his character.

He’s good with his hands, for example. He cut and laid all the rustic hardwood flooring himself.

He’s also artistic – quirky pieces of his artwork decorate the walls, and handmade furnishings function as tables and other practical items.

And he has a thing for antique trunks – there are three in the living room alone.

Lee, 45, has been restoring old trunks for two decades. It’s a hobby turned part-time income source that supplements his full-time landscaping business.

“It started because I did a good deed,” Lee explains. “When I was a college student, I wanted to make a glass-top table over an iron wheel, and I stopped at a yard sale at an old shack, looking for a wheel. Nothing there worked, but I could tell this old man really needed to sell something, so I bought this little trunk. I refinished it, and it looked pretty good.”

That experience prompted Lee to buy another old trunk, refinish it and sell it.

“I made good money off it, and I said, ‘Hey, I need to do more of that,’ ” he recalls.

Since then, Lee has restored almost 600 antique trunks, both those he bought and custom jobs for other people.

“I was just having fun with it, and then [in 1992] the Sunday Tennessean newspaper did a story on me,” Lee says. “That really turned the faucet on. At one time I had 17 trunks here waiting to be worked on.”

Lee’s affinity for trunk restoration is partly due to the remarkable stories that have landed on his doorstep in many a worn-out trunk.

“Some people from Hendersonville brought me an old trunk that had been in a barn,” he says. “Inside was a tray with a little drawer, which they had overlooked and never opened. I opened it, and it was full of jewelry and an old pocket watch. I called them, and they were flabbergasted.

“It was this gal’s granddaddy’s watch, and when he’d died, nobody knew where his watch had gone. They wrote me a letter of thanks for finding it.”

More often than not, people hold on to old trunks because they have sentimental value.

“One guy brought me one that was rough as a cob,” Lee says.

“I asked him if it had sentimental value, because otherwise it wouldn’t even have been worth fixing. He said, ‘My granddaddy pulled this out of the river after a steamboat sunk.’ That trunk worked me to death, but when he got it back, it looked good.”

Getting trunks that look “rough” is not uncommon for Lee. In fact, most of them do.

“Some are hideous when they’re brought here – the wood is almost black with years of dust and grime,” he says.

Trunks come in many shapes and sizes, but perhaps most common are flat-tops and camelbacks.

“The round-top trunks were considered more decorative and typically were ladies’ trunks,” Lee says. “When traveling by train or boat, people used to stack the trunks. The flat-top gentlemen’s trunks would go on the bottom, and the round-top ladies’ trunks would go on top, so the ladies would get less of a wait when unloading them.”

Lee has done a lot of research on trunks and can usually determine the decade a trunk was made just by looking at it.

“I even have an old 1900s Sears catalog that they sold a lot of them in, and I’ve been able to find some of the ones I’ve worked on in there,” he says.

Lee charges between $225 and $325 for a custom restoration job, sometimes less if there’s not a lot of stripping involved. The finished products are proudly displayed in their owner’s homes, often as coffee or end tables.

“The value of a trunk is often underappreciated,” Lee says. “If you buy a coffee table from a furniture store, it depreciates the second you take it out to the parking lot. But if you invest in a good antique trunk, it will only go up in value.”

Step-by-Step Restoration

Restoring a trunk requires a chemical stripping agent, a hose and brush, and “a lot of elbow grease,” according to Kerry Lee. Here’s how the process breaks down:

* The trunk’s wood is stripped of dirt, paint and grime.
* The trunk is sanded and stained.
* Worn or damaged parts like hinges, locks and handles are replaced.
* Metal pieces are painted with a special paint mixed by Lee to replicate old iron.
* If necessary, contact paper or fabric that has been added to the trunk’s interior in recent years is removed.

To contact Lee, call (615) 299-8642.

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Magazine:
Tennessee Home & Farm, Fall 2010 Edition Edition

Headline:
Trunks to Treasures

Summary:
Tattered antiques get a second chance.

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