By Leslie Williams
At first glance, Furniture Rehab, a weeks-old addition to the stores on Magazine Street, appears indistinguishable from similar enterprises on the charming New Orleans thoroughfare lined with small businesses.

A Spanish cedar coffee table, an ornate rocking chair, a sturdy armoire, a curio cabinet, beach chairs, benches, a prayer kneeler and a cypress table contribute to an eclectic assortment of furnishings inside.


The craftsmanship of these pieces, though, may have more sociological than economic implications for the city.

The clerk processing the sales, Larry Jones, recently graduated from a substance abuse program at Odyssey House Louisiana, a nonprofit agency near the Esplanade Ridge neighborhood. The furniture inside the store at 3638 Magazine St. comes from the handiwork of recovering addicts being trained to cut, sand, glue and stain at a workshop on the Odyssey campus at 1125 N. Tonti St., about five miles away.

“Most of us are introduced to the program with a palm sander,” said Ronald DeLaune, who has been a participant in the nonprofit’s drug rehabilitation program for more than six months and a worker in the furniture rehabilitation program since February. “They give you one and tell you to sand away.”

Under the direction of Randy Purpura, manager of the program and the North Tonti workshop, the skills of DeLaune and other recovering addicts have evolved.

“I’m finding out I’m relatively talented at it,” said DeLaune, who assisted Purpura and others in harvesting cypress and other raw materials discarded from hurricane- and flood-damaged homes. “The first time I was impressed with something I built on my own was when I made an 8-foot-by-4-foot table from salvaged lumber. I like the old wood. It’s beat up and it’s got character.”

“It’s interesting to see a finished project come completely out of my head,” DeLaune said.

About 40 recovering addicts have participated in the furniture program since Odyssey began preparing a year ago to open a furniture store. Of that number, about 15 participants were lost because they didn’t complete the drug rehabilitation program, Purpura said. Two graduated. One of them works in the construction industry, he said.

Months were spent building the 2,500-square-foot workshop on North Tonti, he said. It includes offices and a classroom. Of the raw materials used to build the furniture, about 90 percent comes from items salvaged from the streets. The remaining 10 percent was purchased or donated, he said.

Under Purpura’s tutelage, recovering addicts build and restore pieces in the workshop equipped with table, miter and band saws, planers, drills, sanders and grinders used to clean hinges, handles and other recycled hardware.