You’re handing over something that matters. Here’s who’s handling it.

I’m the one who answers the phone, writes the quote, and does the work. This is FabLab Upholstery Shop, formerly Furbish Upholstery, and it runs out of Unit M on Sonora Road in Springdale.

I got into upholstery the way most people do — by taking something apart that shouldn’t have been thrown away. Underneath a tired cover there was a hardwood frame, hand-tied springs, and joinery nobody builds into furniture at a store price anymore. Once you see that, replacing a good frame because the fabric wore out stops making sense.

The “FabLab” part is literal: fabrication laboratory. Fabric and fabrication both live in the name. Some jobs are pure textile work — a cushion cover, a set of dining seats. Others are problem-solving: a boat bench with a rotted plywood base, a booth that has to fit a room it was never built for, a chair whose arm was broken and glued badly in 1985. The lab half is where those get worked out.

What’s in Unit M: cutting tables long enough to lay out a full sofa’s worth of yardage, industrial walking-foot machines, a foam saw, spring tools, compressors and pneumatic staplers, a fabric library you can put your hands on, and racks where your piece sits under cover — indoors, dry, out of the sun — from the day it arrives until the day it goes home.

People bring me grandmother’s wing chair, the sofa they saved for, the boat the family learned to ski behind. I treat all three the same way.