Of treasure, trash and two who found love
By SHARON TUBBS
Published April 13, 2007
I finished the interview feeling good, then came to one of a writer's worst realities. I had too many angles to choose from.
One couple does their small part in saving the environment.
Two "artists" leave their creative mark in Seminole Heights.
Boy meets girl at Guavaween; they stick together through trash and treasure.
(You should know that I can be indecisive. At a restaurant this week, I changed my mind three times between the coconut cheesecake and the hot apple crisp pie.)
What should the focus of the story be?
Looming deadlines force me simply to begin.
Our setting is Tampa Street Market, an eclectic furniture shop that smells of paint fumes. I'm told to enter through a creaky doggy door convenient only for an attention-seeking mutt named Baci. A fan in the window whirls cool air from an evening breeze.
Inside, Charles sands an old teak wood table. Amy sits behind a wooden contraption with tiny pullout drawers. It's somewhat obscure, and she doesn't know what to call it - a small pantry maybe?
These are the kinds of spoils the Haynies work with everyday. They ride around in their station wagon, scavenging for broken and worn furniture, wood and scraps. The theme from Sanford and Son sometimes rings in Charles' head.
They bring their booty here to N Florida Avenue, just south of Hillsborough Avenue.
They weren't what I expected at a junk shop. I had prepared myself for a woman with a free spirit and deep lines of wisdom etched in her face.
In person, Amy is wearing khaki pants, a polo shirt under a bright yellow apron and gym shoes. Her long brown hair is pulled back in a ponytail, exposing a round, girlish face. And she is all of 35.
Charles wears jeans, a T-shirt and sneakers. He has short dark hair and a stubbly beard. At 31, he is a mechanical engineer for Sun Hydraulics in Sarasota by day. (He was still in training pants when Redd Foxx played TV's cantankerous widower and trashman.)
Welcome the new face of the junk dealer.
But I should be politically correct. I ask what they call themselves.
They look at each other.
I help them along. Are you artists?
"Somewhat," Amy says.
They deal in "furniture art," Charles decides.
Amy: "It's not really a classification for that yet."
This is a form of recycling, the Haynies say. They make trash "functional" so people can use it rather than clog up landfills and trash heaps with stuff that would take lifetimes to decompose.
They transform recycled wood into tables and shutters into bookcases.
They take in half-filled buckets of paints from Seminole Heights neighbors done redoing their bungalows. They only use the water-based kind. And for some reason, she now has an abundance of sage green.
They nab derelict footlockers. They polish and refurbish them, make them pretty and practical for storage.
Nature is important to both of them. Amy's from Cincinnati and grew up fishing and bird-watching with her father.
Charles is from small-town Carthage, Texas, and remembers peering out of the car window in the 1970s and 1980s, wondering why all the land was disappearing and being replaced by buildings and highways.
They came together six years ago at an Irish bar in Ybor City during Guavaween. Each was trying to escape the madness outside and found the other.
"We've been inseparable ever since," Charles says.
They married in 2004 and live in Seminole Heights within walking distance of the shop, which they opened last year, a week before Christmas. Every now and then, someone comes in and tells them that a table or a set of chairs could be worth a lot of money.
They don't care, though. They'd tick off the experts on Antiques Roadshow, painting over weathered wood.
"I think we're both concerned with actually doing something that we really love and working together," Amy says.
Artists in the neighborhood stop by and ask to show their artwork here. So the Haynies turned a cramped hallway into a gallery. Early next month, they'll host a grand opening for the shop and the gallery.
They don't run air conditioning in the shop for energy's sake. They'll open windows and turn on fans until the heat gets unbearable in summer.
As I think back to that day, it was comfortable inside. I felt the cool cross-breeze and now wonder if I should get a fan, open my windows more, let the fresh air in.
And, finally, I have an angle:
Just an interesting couple living their dream.