Sometimes, dreams take shape in unexpected ways. Around 2015, Amanda Goetz began restoring furniture as her four college-age children set up their own residences. Soon, their friends wanted Goetz’s help with their furniture, and she kept up by working on projects on nights and weekends.
Her side hustle gained steam in June 2022 when she was laid off as a sales manager for a Louisville, Kentucky, tech company. “My furniture business was generating a lot of income at that point, so I said, ‘Let me just try to do just this,’” Goetz says. Between her sister Liz Miller, a Realtor with ERA First Advantage Realty, and her daughter-in-law, a nurse with Deaconess Health System, Goetz already had a following in the Evansville area. She says that was a major factor in her decision to move from Louisville in September 2022 and renovate a home in Downtown Newburgh, Indiana.
Goetz is commissioned by clients, many of whom inherit furniture like a China cabinet and want to repurpose it. “They have it, they don’t want to get rid of it, but it doesn’t really go with their current aesthetic,” she says.
That’s where J. Mead Design Studio steps in. From her basement workshop, Goetz strips, sands, and primes pieces for their next chapter. In her paint booth, she mixes colors and sprays in even strokes. Between cleaning, prepping, priming, and spraying, a custom piece may take three days to finish — longer, if it’s extremely dirty or in disrepair.
Because she has one paint booth, she can spray only a single piece at a time. For furniture intended for holiday entertaining, “a lot of people want their pieces delivered by Thanksgiving, so I might be prepping three pieces at a time, then rotating them through the paint booth using multiple sprayers loaded with custom colors, and then also working on re-staining pieces in the garage,” she says.
Clients request work on all kinds of furniture. She enjoys giving pieces a new purpose. “Dressers don’t always stay in the bedroom. People use them as a media console piece to put under a TV or use them as a buffet,” she says.
Although her journey began through refinishing furniture to suit her own projects, most of Goetz’s business comes from client-owned pieces. “Either someone already has a piece, or somebody says, ‘I have a little girl’s bedroom and I want a French Provincial dresser.’ I’ll find the dresser, they buy it, and I do to it what they want. It’s really turned into more client-driven design,” she says. Goetz also shops for clients who have a vision but no furniture in hand to complete it. “I love it when they send me their design board and say, ‘Can you find this?’” she says.
