The chairs that started everything
"I'm a Melbourne mum based in the inner north, and I accidentally discovered this obsession while deep in the early days of motherhood."
It started with a little set of thrift store children's chairs. I had a 10 month old, I was newly pregnant, and I absolutely did not need kids' chairs. There was no logical reason to buy them. But something about them just spoke to me. I felt this pull to bring them back to life.
So I brought them home with no idea what I was doing.
I refinished them anyway. And I loved it.
When they didn't fit our space, I sold them and realised how good it felt to have something that was mine. Something I could focus on. Something with my hands. It felt grounding in a time that was otherwise overwhelming.
I didn't set out to start a business. I just needed something that anchored me through the chaos of early motherhood.
But I kept going. Piece by piece. Project by project. And I started to notice something. People didn't just like what I was doing. They wanted to buy it.
Eventually I went back to my regular job. But I could not escape the pull that furniture restoration had on me. I was obsessed. I was bringing drawers to work and sanding them in my lunch breaks. I was working on pieces in the evenings after the kids went to bed, and squeezing it in on weekends whenever I could.
What started as something I needed slowly became something I couldn't ignore.
After two years of doing this alongside work and motherhood, I made the decision at the start of 2026 to leave my job and commit to it fully.
That's when Jazzed Up Grain was born.