VALDOSTA — Bill Taylor says his love of wood working is just a good hobby gone bad. But that’s good for those seeking antique replicas of exquisite furniture from the days of old.

Taylor owns Tomorrow’s Heirlooms, a woodworking shop he operates in an old downtown building. He sells his hand crafted furniture exclusively through Turner’s Fine Furniture on North Valdosta Road and at Turner’s showrooms in Tallahassee, Thomasville, Tifton and Moultrie. Just ask to see Taylor’s line of Tomorrow’s Heirlooms.

Taylor also sells his furniture through French Market Antiques in Fernandina, Fla., where his pieces sit on a showroom that includes real antiques from France. (See www.frenchmarketantiques.com). And you can find his pieces in the quaint shops of Havanna, Fla., near Tallahassee.

Taylor specializes in heart pine dining tables but also makes furniture from cherry and mahogany. He makes dining tables, end tables, coffee tables, Hunter’s boards, Adirondack chairs and just about anything a potential customer can show him in a picture.

What makes Taylor’s work exceptional besides his obvious wood working abilities is that he uses only wood that’s at least 100 years old, some pieces as old as 150 years, that he’s collected from local demolitions of historic structures. “Most of it was cut in the 1850s or around then,” he said.

So the replicas are, in effect, made of real antique wood that’s been saved by Taylor from a trip to the land fill. Jerry Cooper has done a lot of local demolitions, including the old train station, the former Valdosta Feed and Seed and some old houses that have yielded Taylor a good amount of old wood for making his signature furniture, he noted.

“It’s a shame those old buildings have to go away, but at least we can preserve the old wood for a good purpose that reminds us of the past,” Taylor said.

Another feature of Taylor’s work is that he utilizes the Colonial period style of wooden joints and pegs to build the tables.

“They call it ‘mortise and tennon,’ which is French,” Taylor explained. “It makes joints that are solid as a rock. The Industrial Revolution changed all that because they began to use steel instead.”

Also, Taylor can handle a customer’s request, such as adding a leaf extension or building the table to an unusual dimension or size. “If they see a piece on the Turner’s showroom and decide they’d like to have that type of piece but with customized specs, all they need to do is tell the showroom people and they’ll place the order with me,” he said.

Also, if you see a table in a photograph that you can’t seem to find anywhere, contact Taylor through Turner’s and he’ll determine if he can replicate the piece. “More often than not, I can do it,” he said.

So where did Taylor acquire all these incredible skills that enables him to turn a pile of what appears to most to be scrap wood into some of the most beautiful furniture one can lay eyes on today?

“I’m from what I like to call the Tri-City area of Valdosta. Until junior high (middle school today) I lived in Quitman, but then moved to Valdosta and lived in a house on Jerry Jones Road where I grew up, really,” Taylor said. “I went to California in the 1980s to go to college at Cal State in Humbolt County, which is in Redwood country on the coast of northern California. My uncle was a wood craftsman in San Francisco in the 1960s, but had retired. My cousin and I pulled him out of retirement, however, and brought him to Humbolt County to open a shop there. We needed money for school and we needed the work. I learned all these skills from my uncle. We’d take heart pine and make things out of it.”

When Taylor came home to Georgia, however, he didn’t pursue the wood working direction right away. He went to work in Production Anodizing in Adel, a metal finishing plant owned by his father, George Taylor.

“For many years it was called the hub cap capital of the world because just about every hub cap placed on GM, Ford, Chevy and Chrysler vehicles came through that plant,” Taylor said.

After his father died, the family sold the plant in the 1990s. Taylor began working with his wood skills again and by 2001, he got a break he wasn’t expecting. His girlfriend had gone into a Turner’s showroom in Tallahassee and bragged to the store personnel about Taylor’s work.

“The Turner’s people said, well, seeing is believing, so I took them some samples and they were sold,” Taylor said.

Today the furniture industry is battling a roller coaster economy as are many businesses, but Taylor expects the ongoing slow down to pick up because of the specialty work he does to create such beautiful antique replicas.

“You just can’t find this stuff anywhere,” Taylor said. “Like this hunt board. They used these in the Colonial period. The ladies would prepare food for the hunters and take it outside and place it on these tall tables. That way the hunters wouldn’t have to dismount from their horses to pick up the food. You can’t find original antique hunt boards because they were kept outside and have pretty much disintegrated from the weathering. But I can make one that looks brand new and like it came from the same period, built the same way.”

Potential customers seeking this type of furniture can contact Taylor with questions or to request more information on his custom work by calling him at 229-292-4081.

“This is just a good hobby that went bad. Now it’s my full time job,” Taylor said. “But I love what I do. You’ll find a lot of my tables in homes all around Valdosta.”

Taylor’s work also can be found in the northeast, as the Fernandina shop ships orders out of state. “There’s probably a few of my tables in Manhattan,” he said with a wry grin.