A small Topsham furniture maker has proven resilient in more ways than one, still operating his business years after an illness left him in a wheelchair.

Dave Gosselin, 59, owner of Red Barn Furniture & Millwork, works from his home-based shop in Topsham, where he has lived since 1992.

He ran Gosselin Builders, working on houses, renovations and additions across the Midcoast for 26 years. He oversaw a team of a dozen builders, with his wife working in the office full time while Gosselin and his crew would work on homes. That all came to a grinding halt in 2014.

“I went to work one day and felt a little funny in the backside,” Gosselin said. “By dinner time that night, I was paralyzed from the waist down. So they put me in the hospital and did major surgery on my back, thinking it was going to take care of it, and it didn’t.”

To this day, Gosselin said his doctors still aren’t sure what caused his sudden paralysis.

After a week and a half at Maine Medical Center, doctors sent Gosselin to a rehab hospital because they didn’t know what was wrong and told him he might not walk again.

Facing the challenges of running a family business

Eight years ago, Gosselin couldn’t resist the urge to work with his hands, and eventually, he began making furniture under the Red Barn name.

“I now know that I should have been doing this all along because it is coming to me a lot easier than construction did,” Gosselin said.

Gosselin remembers one job early on building tables and furniture for a Portland restaurant called Scales. More recently, he has been taking on full-time clients, rather than picking up subcontractor gigs. It gives Gosselin more flexibility with furniture design, with his current project being base cabinets for a kitchen.

Gosselin and his son Sam, 28, make 15–20 pieces of furniture in a year, with cabinets and tables taking longer than kitchen furniture.

Sam acts as Dave’s part-time caretaker, but he also works with his father, making and moving furniture for Red Barn. Gosselin comes from a family involved in retail furniture since the 1920s, with his great-grandfather passing the business called F.J. Gosselin & Sons to his grandfather and father. When the recession of the 1980s hit, they had to fold the business.

When the pandemic hit, the price of the materials that Gosselin used for his furniture was stable and didn’t immediately jump like the costs for 2-by-4s. However, at the tail end of the pandemic, Gosselin said that higher costs eventually came to his materials, going from $125 to $200 per sheet.

The price for the materials Gosselin uses has rolled back between 5% and 10%, but solid wood prices have fluctuated since.

Hands-on passion projects

When Gosselin isn’t building furniture, he works on passion projects, making plant stands, coffee tables, end tables, and a few stools and chairs using reclaimed wood 100 years old and older that he has collected over the years. One plant table that Gosselin pointed out is made from a 200-year-old piece of wood from Bailey Island that looked greyed out and could not be imitated.

Every piece of reclaimed wood that Gosselin uses in his projects is a one-off, hand-crafted piece of furniture, like a bookshelf shaped like a TV that can be put up in a window. The board comes from a home built in the 1700s or 1800s.

“It’s something that has spent its lifetime doing the duty, being framing, wall boards or floorboards in a house, and then now it has been collected without damage as much as possible to be reused in a new project,” Gosselin said. “The crustier, the better.”

Gosselin works with the character of the wood, meaning he keeps the blemishes and knot holes rather than just cutting them off or sanding them down. He also keeps all the “live edges” of the wood, meaning the outer layer of the wood that used to have bark on it.

Two years ago, the Gosselins worked making reclaimed Douglas fir furniture for a 28-square-foot bar called Burano’s Restaurant in Scarborough. The boards used in the furniture came from older homes and old mills from Brunswick, Orr’s Island, Bailey Island and Portland.

Gosselin has a website to sell his custom furniture, but he is also considering hiring someone to help him create an Etsy store page. He is also interested in participating in the Common Ground Fair held in Unity.