In 2017, Lyle Zimbler was a hobbyist woodworker when his wife’s response to a Facebook post on Oak Park Working Moms provided an outlet to a new career. A woman posted looking for recommendations for table refinishing, and Betsy Zimbler recommended her husband.
After landing his first paying job with the help of Facebook and Betsy, he got to work rebuilding the table. He recalls, “After I rebuilt the base, I called the owners to talk about the stain color for the top, and discovered the wife grew up in our house on Home Avenue, which was a neat connection. It sent a flare up in my head: this is a legitimate thing that I can do.”
Those moments of connection between customers and their wood furniture and doors that need refinishing has been keeping Zimbler going for almost 10 years, through two moves, both within Oak Park and to the family’s last landing spot in South Bend.
“What’s cool is seeing people’s jobs — whether it’s a door or table – come back to life. One customer, her dad was at her house when we delivered the table, and it was his dad’s table. There were tears flowing. The history of the project tells the connection story of the family.”
To date, Zimbler has restored over 150 doors in Oak Park. Even though he has moved the studio for Zimbler Furniture Refinishing to South Bend, Zimbler is back in Oak Park regularly. He and Betsy lived in Oak Park for over 25 years, raising their two kids in town.
Today, he makes regular house calls to Oak Park and River Forest to pick up interior doors and furniture to refinish in his South Bend studio. During the warmer months, he refinishes exterior doors on-site.
It’s a multi-step process: he takes the door off, refinishes and repairs it, then rehangs the door. He comes back the second day for a coat of stain and a third day to finish the process.
Working on doors gives him a good amount of job satisfaction. “It’s about not wanting to see a good piece of wood go into the dumpster. These doors and other pieces were geared to last, unlike today’s stuff which is made of veneer and cheaper materials.”
His website: https://www.zimblerfurniturerefinishing.com/ has a page of testimonials of pleased customers, one of whom touts the historic preservation principles behind refinishing doors rather than buying new.
Zimbler has been helping Oak Park Realtor Laura Maychruk by refinishing all of the interior doors on her new home, which she details in her You Tube series: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jHE3WkCrjrI
Zimbler has finished 12 of Maychruk’s 20 original doors, and due to a stroke of luck, narrowly avoided disaster. Last fall, the garage that Zimbler used for a studio caught on fire. He was able to save Maychruk’s doors, but the garage was a total loss. He’s since procured a commercial space for his refinishing work and says he and his loyal doodle Molly can be found there most days working on projects.
Proving the power of a good teacher, Zimbler credits his junior high shop teacher with his love of woodworking. “Mr. Nelson at East Prairie in Skokie really taught me. He praised my work, and it sunk in my head. Later, I took some classes in Chicago, and some of this is self-taught.”
Once the business started building up, he says it really became about how much equipment he could buy without it taking over his house. Along the way, Betsy has been his biggest cheerleader, but he notes, she prefers not to ride in his car anymore due to all the wood dust.
Zimbler sees his side career as something he will continue even as he and Betsy plan their empty nest years around a new RV purchase and trips with Molly.
He calls woodworking a good retirement job and says, “I love meeting people and hearing their stories. I love seeing items come back to life. When I first started, people thought this was a niche business, but to me, the real headline is that people from Oak Park and River Forest really care about their old houses.”
