“It is junkology that we have turned into something else and made for sale,” said Lucy Capps, owner of LL Junkology Shop, located at 401 E. Main in Eagle Lake, Texas. LL stands for Lucy & Lynn. These two women work together to take a lot of junk and do something with it – they repurpose and upcycle.
“Just changing a little bit in it and doing something with it -anything we can do to add an extra little art to it.”
The women paint decorative art on old rusted gas cans and sell them for $25 to $35. They have their own system for pricing items. “We say, ‘what would we pay for this?’ if we were buying it ourselves, and that’s our price. We have fun with it; we’re not making a living off of it.” The prices are reasonable, and dealers from Austin and Houston come to LL Junkology to buy and take items back to their shops for resale.
Renell Moore May 27, 2018
Re-purposed Rusted Yard Art
Along with managing her shop in Eagle Lake, Texas, Lucy remodels homes and enlarges old bathrooms in homes built in the sixties. She lives in a Greek colonial home – and received the yard of the month award in Eagle Lake, Texas last month.
The area outside the shop is filled with rusted yard art, such as an old vintage Montgomery Ward wagon. “We didn’t do anything to it except put a lot of dirt and plants in it, and it was gone – just like that!” Other interesting and unique items include a rusted door from an old Model T painted with flowers and the phrase “When one door shuts, another one opens.” An old vintage refrigerator tray is re-purposed to make a plant container.
Junkology, Timeworn, Oxidized Engine Parts Upcycled
Amid the rusted items are an uncommon wind chime (made from a timeworn oxidized engine part, painted with blue and purple foilage,dangled and ready to string the chimes onto it), a rusted tractor seat splashed with blossoms, half a wheel barrow filled with soil and ground covers and a long-standing discolored double pump bicycle.
Yard Art Created From Glass Plate Layers
Another hot selling item includes a 2 and half foot glass floret made from layers of glass plates, a saucer and a candy dish. The plant stem is made from PVC plumbing parts and ¾ inch pipe. A rusted old box springs can be re-purposed to have a potato plant vine wind into the tarnished springs and grow on.
Goodwill Finds Given New Life
Inside the shop, customers will have their choice of a lot of different things, such as an old kitchen chair painted silver with an added vintage brooch featuring sparkly rhinestones and a faux ostrich upholstered seat. She tries to find things at Goodwill and give them a new life.
“We will stick pins on all kinds of pillows, like an old cameo and pieces of earrings.”
One distinctive piece is a painted deer head with decorative jewels.
Lucy uses E6000 glue because she has found it works better than using hot glue
“Sometimes we refurbish and paint and sometimes we don’t – we recreated one chair that was a wicker rattan. The rattan was all rotted so we painted the chairs and then placed some nice cushions that had come off of some other timeworn chairs on them.”
