UNION — The name started as a joke, something Gary Harriman’s friend and business partner, Kevin Davis, came up with. “As we assembled different pieces of wood together to make something new, Kevin said, ‘Well I don’t know about this Frankenstein Furniture’ and I said, ‘That’s a perfect name for it.’”

Harriman’s garage in Union isn’t a creepy old laboratory, but it is filled with bits and pieces and odd parts. Dismantled barn boards and stacks of old wooden bed posts, moldings and distressed boards stand up against the walls.

As a micro-business, it’s not feasible to buy new wood to make the furniture. Harriman prefers to find raw materials that would otherwise go into a landfill, so all of the wood he uses in his furniture is recycled and reclaimed. He finds lumber from yard sales, dismantled barns, antique and junkyard stores, like Elmer’s Barn and Liberty Tool — and sometimes, he just sees cast offs on the side of the road and picks them up.

“I use a lot of bed posts and frames to make legs of tables,” he said. “A lot of discarded furniture is made of solid maple or cherry. I’ll cut the whole thing up and use all of the parts of it.”

Harriman said he’s self taught. “My dad taught me a lot about refinishing furniture,” he said. “So, I just expanded from that. I had an antique shop called Union Antique Traders and was just doing furniture building on the side, so I got to understand how many people want furniture that’s old and distressed, but still fits into their modern lifestyle.”

All winter, he spends his time in his garage, envisioning creative ways to cobble together various pieces. “I just love being out here,” he said. “When I had the antique shop, I’d stand around all day in January, February waiting for people to come in. I’d rather be doing something with my time and just come out here and work on new pieces.”

In a way, his garage is a miniaturized version of Elmer’s Barn in Cooper’s Mills, with an area dedicated to pieces of hardware and other odds and ends. “I never throw anything out,” he said. “Every little scrap should be used, whether a piece of leftover wood gets chopped down to be glue blocks or whether I need something in this junk pile as a decorative item.”

Frankenstein Furniture has really taken off and now he does woodworking full time and the antique shop on the side. He recently made an entryway bench for a mudroom out of an early 1900s door. But he’s really known for making 7- to 8-foot-long harvest tables out of various pieces of recycled wood. He recently did 30 tables for a Kennebunkport restaurant. As the old Depression era expression goes: “Use It Up, Wear It Out, Make It Do, or Do Without!”

You can find more Frankenstein Furniture in booth #12 at Rockland Antique Marketplace, where Harriman’s work is displayed or visit: his Facebook page.

Kay Stephens can be reached at news@penbaypilot.com