by Dennis Dalman
editor@thenewsleaders.com
Give Lisa Viste an object – any old object, the older the better – and just like that (presto!) – she’ll turn it into something else, like a sleight-of-hand magician.
Viste is the owner-operator of Same As It Never Was, a worn-a-bit shop in downtown Rice. Sometimes customers have trouble wrapping their minds around her shop’s strange name, which sounds like a mystery, a riddle. Well, said Viste, it’s supposed to be mysterious, suggesting something is the same object as it first was and yet it now has a new purpose through a transformational process.
She started the shop a year ago last March and already has a loyal following, including some customers who come from many miles away to check out the ever-changing contents of her shop. Many of her buyers are people passing through Rice on their way up north to vacation spots and family cabins.
Viste is a firm believer in the phrase “new lease on life.” She grew up in Milaca in a family that had a born knack for taking old things and giving them new purposes.
“We were always repurposing, recycling, finding new ways to use something and never wasting anything,” Viste said. “In a way, we did that partly out of necessity, but also because we enjoyed doing it.”
Her parents, Don and Cheryl Daily, who still live in Milaca, spend a lot of time scavenging old items for Lisa and her shop. They go to estate sales, garage sales, auctions and relatives’ homes, scrounging any unwanted items. Some of the old items typically include old windows, old doors, antique vanity dressers or tables, ammo boxes, wooden drawers, metal implements, old peach crates, framed photographs from the distant past and all kinds of intriguing knick-knacks and assorted bric-a-brac.
Past-Present
A visit to Same As It Never Was is like visiting the past that has been rearranged and given new uses. Hanging from the ceiling, for example, are two lamp shades which were made out of schoolroom world globes with their bottom third portions cut off. On one wall is a wine rack fashioned from an old ammo box. On another wall is a large zinc-metal chicken roost from an old farm hen-house, its multiple round roosting holes ideal for displaying objects, such as old tobacco tins.
Along several walls of the shop stand some of Viste’s signature creations: old window frames with eight panes of glass or more that have been affixed to leg stands. They are ideal for hallways where they can be used to display items behind the glass panes: Christmas cards, children’s or pets’ photos, seasonal decorations or any other items picturesque or sentimental. Viste likes to put Halloween black-paper silhouette cut-outs on the ones she has in her own home. Not surprising since Viste is a self-confessed Halloween goblin who loves to decorate her yard every late October with fun spooky displays, like half-buried coffins with astonished skeletons in them that she and her husband make. At first they made them out of cardboard, then of wood. They sold some and still make them. They also install them on the Rice Elementary School grounds on Haunted House Day.
“We have a fake graveyard in our front yard every Halloween,” she said.
Viste’s sense of fun, mystery and whimsy is apparent throughout her shop. For example, a pitch fork meant as a piece of garden art has a sign on it that says, “Grow, damn it!”
Beginnings
In the past, Viste worked at other consignment and worn-a-bit shops and also sold some of her own creations now and then.
Many years ago, she and husband Tony began building items such as farm tables using different kinds of wood. The first one they built for themselves, but somebody wanted to buy it so they sold it, built another one for themselves and kept building more to sell to others.
Eventually, Viste started building tall narrow end tables just because she needed some and couldn’t find any on the market.
“Necessity,” she said, “really was the mother of invention, in that case.”
She and Tony have built wine racks and virtually every kind of furniture. In addition, they and their two sons enjoy “stressing” furniture to give it an old battered, well-used “character.”
Family affair
Repurposing is a family affair for the Vistes. Their sons Ian, 23, and Alex, 21, who still live at home, often help out like helpful elves with sanding and painting.
One recent project for the Vistes was the dismantling of a piano.
“It weighed so much we didn’t know how to get rid of it,” Viste said, “so we just took it apart. I’ll save some of the pieces from it, like the keys and maybe make a wreathe out of them.
Viste likes to surround herself with creative people.
“It’s fun to bounce ideas off of artists,” she said. “They understand what my dreams are.”
She also enjoys bouncing ideas off of her customers. They comprise a kind of brotherhood-sisterhood of camaraderie. People who enjoy old objects and repurposed creations tend to be on the same wave-length, like-minded people, she explained.
“My customers are a wide range of ages, both men and women,” she said.
When Viste is not looking for new purposes for old things, she loves to garden in the spring and summer months.
The Viste family has lived in Rice for the past 12 years. Tony is assistant manager at the St. Cloud Municipal Athletic Complex; son Alex drives a Zamboni at that complex’s ice arena; son Ian works for the City of St. Cloud in its I.T. computer department.
Same As It Never Was is open from 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Wednesday-Friday and from 10 a.m.-4 p.m. Saturday. It is closed Monday, Tuesday and Sunday. Its number is 320-309-9449.
Lisa Viste, owner of the Same As It Never Was shop in Rice, enjoys making new purposes out of old objects. The “shelf” behind her is actually a metal chicken egg-laying roost from an old farm.
Two old classroom world globes were repurposed into lamp shades by Lisa Viste.
An old eight-pane window frame is now a thin table, ideal for a hallway, as repurposed by Lisa Viste of the Same As It Never Was shop in Rice.
Old vanity dressers are highly prized by some antique collectors.
This ceramic shoe, reminiscent of Cinderella’s dilemma, is one of the many unusual objects in the Same As It Never Was shop in Rice.
