While visiting a friend recently, I commented on the octagon-shaped antique table, with green marble top, sitting beside me in the living room. Very nice.

“We saved it,” he said with a smile. “It was in a basement. The legs were rotting off.”

Like me, John Dreher doesn’t know the word “hopeless.” He got the table for free, cut off the rotted legs, found matching turnings at a lumber yard, glued and pegged them on, sanded, stained and varnished. Then he had marble cut and beveled to make a beautiful new top.

It took vision, skill and work, but he and his wife, Barbara, now have a little piece of 1915 like no other. They’re proud of the result. They should be.

I, too, am drawn to seemingly lost causes. I see potential, quality and value when many don’t. I love returning “worthless junk” to usefulness, beauty and a second life. It’s at the core of historic preservation, reuse and It’s absorbing, creative, nourishing, satisfying. It has allowed me to own some things that I wouldn’t have owned otherwise.

I think about our old house on Buchanan Street in Danville, built in 1880 in the uncommon Stick Style, it was once the home of my great-grandparents. My grandmother spent some of her teenage years there with six siblings. Her grandmother, born in Minden, Prussia in 1845, would visit.

Years passed. First it was divided into two apartments, then four. The wrap-around porch disappeared. Asbestos siding, cheap paneling and insane plumbing were added. Uncaring tenants moved in and out. Finally, the bank foreclosed on the landlord’s many low- rent rental properties.

Laurie and I had a nice house and a baby, but we bought the place anyway. I went to work. It took five years of planning, patching, reinforcing, hauling, scraping and painting, but in the end we had a big, beautiful single-family home … loved once again.

Mike Wolfe, of TV’s American Pickers, talks about how he values ​​old things that show their age. He’d rather have honest wear and “patina” than smooth surfaces and shiny new paint. “Perfection is boring,” he says. I agree .

Our house is full of non-boring, high quality furniture that I bought, gently restored and returned to service. I’d rather have old-growth, solid oak, walnut or cherry, dovetailed joints and thick steel screws than the cheap, stapled -together particle board and plastic that passes for furniture today.

Most of my tools are second-hand, too. They include the heavy-duty Black & Decker bench grinder, the brawny Milwaukee half-inch drill and my beloved Rock Island Manufacturing Company bench vise, which cost me 10 bucks, 25 years ago. I use it almost daily.

The other day, I bought a dirty, but American-made, contractor-grade, worm-drive Skillsaw circular saw for $18. Back home, I filled the gear box with heavy oil and replaced the blade. It sliced ​​through an oak board like a hot knife through Crisco. Yet another save. How beautiful.