AUSTINTOWN -- Ted Barber's love of working with his hands led him to open Abie's 4 Mile Antiques.

AUSTINTOWN -- Ted Barber's love of working with his hands led him to open Abie's 4 Mile Antiques.
As a teenager, he restored antiques as a hobby. He also excelled in his high school art class, and his teacher recommended that he attend art school.
Taking his teacher's advice, Barber went on to the Art Institute of Pittsburgh, earning a degree in commercial art.
After running his own advertising agency, Barber Graphics, in Pittsburgh for 10 years, Barber decided it was time to move on.
"When computers started taking over the art business and the advertising business, I got out of it," he said.
Fine-art pursuit
After working in car sales for a while, Barber decided to pursue his interest in fine art, painting landscapes and seascapes. While selling his artwork at an antique mall in Hubbard, other dealers noticed the frames Barber had made for his paintings.
"Other antique dealers started bringing me frames to repair," he explained. "Then they started bringing me little tables and chairs to repair, and I started doing a lot of repairs."
By 1995, business got so good that he opened Abie's 4 Mile Antiques. Barber said the majority of his business was repairs at first, whereas now the bulk of his business is antique and used furniture sales.
"When I first opened, it was all pretty easy because I was mostly doing repairs, and there's very little competition in that field," he said. "The challenges came when I started buying my own furniture and trying to know what things are worth and what's going to sell."
Despite his experience with antiques, Barber said pricing items can be tricky.
"A lot of [pricing] is experience, but a lot of it is just gut feeling, or a combination of both, because you almost never get the same thing twice. But if I've had something similar or seen something auction similar, you can base it on that," Barber said.
He said he encourages people to haggle if they aren't happy with the price.
Repair work goes on
Although Barber is doing mostly sales, he still does repairs, which satisfies his need to work with his hands. He said selling paintings wasn't as lucrative as he had hoped, so this turned out to be a happy medium.
"If I could make a good living painting, I'd rather paint, but this is a good second choice," Barber said. "And I still work on a lot of antique furniture and I have to make parts, and that kind of helps with the creative end of it. I still feel like I'm doing something, using my hands."