ECRU, Miss. (AP) - Walk into Kristy Payne’s place of business, and you feel like you’re in any other antiques shop.
Tables and shelves are lined with milk bottles, wine jugs, frames, canisters, antique hand mirrors, birdhouses, books, teddy bears, baskets, candlesticks and old buckets.
Chairs are draped with vintage quilts, hand-painted signs hang on the walls and furniture is scattered everywhere.
Only Payne doesn’t have an antiques store. Her business is her beauty shop.
“I had a vision for this room,” said Payne, 44. “I wanted a lodge-type feel - rustic with an open ceiling - but I also wanted fancy old-time things. But mostly I wanted a place for my customers to be comfortable and to be entertained.”
Payne’s business, The Beauty Shop, is next to her home in Ecru. The room she turned into her salon originally had dark paneling on the walls. Now, the walls are covered in strips of wood.
“My husband is a roofer so I got all his old wood pallets and took them apart,” she said. “I put the pieces through a table saw to get them the same width and then we put them on the walls.”
Payne always has some sort of project going. She likes to take old furniture and paint it with chalk paint, distress it or refinish it. She’s done chairs, tables, armoires, beds, benches, china cabinets, dressers, coffee tables and porch swings.
“My daughter has said many times, ’Go get something for my mama to work on. She’s running out of things to distress,” Payne said, laughing.
Payne and her husband, Robbie, share three daughters, Brittney, Shelby and Kayla, and four granddaughters. A fourth daughter, Macie, died in a car accident in 2013 when she was a senior at Pontotoc High School.
“A lot of times I’ll put on a pair of Macie’s shoes and I’ll say, ’Me and Macie’s going to go work on a project,’” Payne said. “I can’t be on idle. I have to stay busy. I like anything that keeps my mind going. Believe me, you don’t want to know how my brain works.”
To take a look around Payne’s beauty shop, you’d think she’d been collecting forever.
“I like to say I’m part gypsy,” she said. “My mother’s side of the family always did flea markets and growing up I’d see all these cool things. But I didn’t start collecting until about two years ago. I’ll pick up anything that makes me feel a certain way or makes me smile. Maybe I remember my grandmother having it in her living room.”
On her days off, she goes to antiques shops, flea markets, yard sales and estate sales. She’s even been known to pick up items off the side of the road.
“If it’s free, it’s for me,” Payne said.
Sometimes, she takes pieces of furniture and turns them into other items. Once, she cut up an old roll-top desk to make a table; another time she built a coffee table out of scrap wood.
“I know what I want something to look like,” she said. “I just have to figure out how to get there. Sometimes, a project works and sometimes it don’t. It’s just a hope and a prayer. Most of my projects are organic. They start out as one thing and morph into another.”
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Information from: Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal, http://djournal.com
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