Kathy Austin buys battered, second-hand furniture for a few dollars, and turns it into pieces worth thousands, through her business, Peacocks and Roses.

But the Southampton resident admits when she first started reworking furniture in her garage, she had no idea what she was doing.

“I first saw an article about distressed furniture in a magazine,” she said. “I thought, I have to try that.”

She bought herself a drill, but was not entirely sure how to use it. She is not one for reading directions.

“I had it on the wrong setting and was actually taking the screw out, as I was attempting to put it in,” she said.

“My late stepfather, who lived upstairs, saw me working and showed me the right setting for the drill.”

He tried to give her more advice, but she was not really listening. “I just wanted to get down to it,” she said.

Other than that brief moment with her stepfather, she is entirely self-taught. She learns from watching YouTube instructional videos or just through doing.

They did not teach woodworking to girls when she was in school.

“And back then, I would have thought of it as a man’s thing to do, anyway,” Ms Austin said.

But she shrugs off the idea of power-tool classes for women. “You don’t need a class,” she said. “The tools are easy to use.”

Over the years, as her skills have evolved, her pieces have become more elaborate. She loves a rococo or renaissance style with lots of distressed turquoise and blue paint.

“I use a lot of moulding that would normally be used to frame pictures,” she said.

She gets her furniture through local second-hand stores and websites. The more basic a piece is, the more ready it is to be glammed up.

She is currently working on an antique baby cradle.

Her pieces range from $3,000 for smaller items to $10,000 for a dresser she entered into the Charman Prize at the Masterworks Museum, last year.

The furniture she buys is relatively inexpensive, but the picture frame wood moulding and vintage cherubs she imports from suppliers in California can get pricey. She also puts weeks, sometimes months worth of work into each piece.

Sometimes, people reach out to her and say they love her work, but her furniture costs too much for them. “That’s OK, it’s not for everyone,” she said.

She has her customers, but since Covid-19 began in March 2020, it has taken her a little longer to sell her work, because so many people are tighter on funds.

She has thought about opening a storefront, but said it would be problematic because it takes her so long to complete one piece.

She has a day job in the corporate world and works on her carpentry in her spare time.

“I would have to have a lot of pieces done before I could run a physical store,” she said.

Ms Austin markets her work through social media, but said because it takes her so long to finish one piece, she does not update regularly.

She called her business Peacocks and Roses in 2018, because those are her two favourite things, but the domain name was taken. She had to reach out to the owner of the Peacocks and Roses domain name through Go Daddy.

The world’s largest services platform for entrepreneurs, Go Daddy supplies more than 20 million customers and entrepreneurs globally with the help and tools they need to grow online.

“Thankfully, I did not have to pay a huge amount,” she said.

Photographs of Ms Austin’s work can be found on Facebook under ‘Peacocks and Roses’.