By SUSAN KANTOR/For The News-Gazette

This is part of a two-day look at the trades in East Central Illinois.

Instead of buying toys from a store, Jason Bluhm made planes and tanks for his GI Joes out of wood.

That hobby expanded to building furniture.

Then that hobby became a career.

Bluhm earned a bachelor's degree in advertising from the University of Illinois, but quickly discovered that industry wasn't for him. So he went back to pursue his first love: woodworking.

Bluhm had worked with his father's home repair business and did work for Dennis Riggs, a local farmer and business owner. Riggs proposed opening a furniture repair and refinishing business in a large vacant building in downtown Sidney.

"It was something I would do in my free time for fun; and when I was given the opportunity to do what I like for fun and get paid for it, I thought, 'Yeah, it's a great idea.'"

Riggs bought into a franchise from Fargo, N.D., and he and Bluhm were outfitted with the training and tools to start. And in 2008, they opened FIX-IT, a wood furniture refinishing and repair shop.

A few months into the business, the franchise owner got sick and disbanded it.

"We went from having his support staff to being on our own. Rather than just give up, we decided to keep going with it and keep doing what we could and ever since then, it's just been a big success."

Bluhm is the main wood restorer in the shop; his father occasionally comes in to help. When Bluhm repairs a chair, he disassembles it, cleans and fills each joint with epoxy and clamps the piece back together for 24 hours.

Each morning, Bluhm unclamps the furniture from the previous day. Then he'll do a few minor repairs or sometimes a major repair like reassembling a chest of drawers. In the afternoons, he'll work with spray finish and leave the shop when it's cloudy.

"The degree of what people want me to do to their things is so variable that I never know exactly what I'm going to get into any given day."

He's been working on a variety of things – a 110-year-old maple spring rocker that was stained red, a 90-year-old chest of drawers that had a crack right down the middle and its back coming off. Bluhm gets a lot of cracked or loose chairs or tables with spills that need to be stripped and refinished.

Heirloom repair is a large part of the business.

"With the boomers getting older now, there's a big generation of people with things that have been passed down from their parents who are passing away. It's something that they want to be able to pass on. I've had a lot of things that are going to be passed on, from wooden sleds to chests of drawer to chairs. A lot of it is built really well compared to what you can get today."

The shop in Sidney is one of the few wood restoration shops in the area.

"I guess I'm rare, or at least that's what I'm told by a lot of people who come in or who go to the shows that we've done. They come up and they can't believe that somebody my age has taken an interest in antiques and especially antiques that mean something to people. I guess they usually think that young people aren't into that, but it's something that I've always enjoyed."

Bluhm said his job is sometimes tough. It would be physically easier to sit behind a computer, but he has fun with his job.

"I put out the best work I can on every piece," Bluhm said. "I treat every one like it's the first and last one I'm going to do. And people seem to appreciate that."