It only takes a few seconds after meeting Sue Palmer, owner of Oh! Susannah Furniture Co. Inc., of Spokane, to discover she isnt your typical carpenter.


Palmer is a self-professed girly-girl in a predominantly male profession. She struts around hardware stores in high-heels to buy supplies, wears pearls while she cuts wood at her workbench, and wields a power tool in one hand and a Starbucks Coffee Co. cup in the other.


Employees look skeptically at me when Im buying lumber in Home Depot and say, Are you working on shelves or something? Palmer says. I tell them, No, I build furniture.


Although Palmer has never taken a woodworking class or received any formal carpentry training, she has grown her furniture business to include more than 3,000 customers throughout the U.S. and has products that have been showcased in Better Homes & Gardens and other magazines. Her products range in price from $50 for a footstool to $595 for an entertainment center, and she offers discounts to interior designers.


Palmer moved here from San Diego, about six months ago, to be closer to her dad, who lives in Sandpoint, Idaho, and to escape the high-cost of living in California. Oh! Susannah leases an 1,100-square-foot space at 1406 W. Northwest Blvd., and she has both her shop and a showroom there. Palmer says she had five employees at her 1,700-square-foot shop in California, but works alone here.


The appearance of the Oh! Susannah Furniture store is similar to that of the woman who owns ita mixture of style and grit. Customers enter the building to find painted walls and brightly-colored furniture covering the concrete floor. Palmers shop is at the west end of the store, where equipment and unfinished pieces of wood sit under a thin layer of dust, and a well-worn flannel shirtthat Palmer wears along with her pearl necklaceshangs from a peg.


She says she enjoyed sewing in her childhood and later found that woodworking was a similar concept. When she started her company in San Diego in 1996, she focused on making antique-looking chairs, until other items in an antique store caught her eye.


I thought, How hard can it be to make a bookcase?


Palmer bought a table saw and began producing bookcases, eventually expanding Oh! Susannahs inventory to include tables, cabinets, dining room sets, and bedroom furniture, among other items. She calls her furniture design a New England antique style, with bold folkish colors and stained finishes that have been sanded down to give the wood a more distressed look.


It used to be a lot more rustic, but I still focus on really simple pieces that are obviously handmade, she says. Its supposed to look like it was made in some guys shop with the tools he had.


A few years ago when Mexican rustic furniture, which had been made to look extremely worn, was a trend in home dcor, Palmer used a few original techniques to meet her customers preferences. She hosed down furniture pieces with water then slid them down the muddy alley behind her store in San Diego. She also beat furniture with tire chains to add chips and dents. She says she decided to stop using those techniques after she accidentally severed a leg off of one of her tables.


Oh! Susannah Furniture pieces, although they can be sold as a set, are intended mostly for mix-and-match arrangements, Palmer says. She starts with a basic concept, such as a white-picket fence, and makes bed frames, chairs, or even window shutters using that design. She says she isnt a custom builder, but can customize dimensions and colors for customers.


Everybody has a weird space in their house, usually in their bathroom, that they say, Gosh, if only I could find something that could go right here, she says. Thats where I come in.


Bookcases, small cabinets, and patio furniture are Oh! Susannahs best-selling items, and Palmers favorite project right now is building custom kitchen islands, which have been increasing in demand. She says that since she moved to Spokane shes received more inquiries from customers here about her dining room sets, in contrast to San Diego, where big girl bedroom sets designed for toddlers were most popular. She declines to disclose the companys revenues.


The company offers 33 paints and stains, the most popular of which are olive green, tomato red, and Rockport blue.


She says Spokane customers have been requesting black furniture frequently, and that the paint she buys from a local company is far thicker than the paint she bought in California, which helps the furniture withstand the more extreme temperatures here.


Palmer says shes also learning to adapt to the weather here, and she surprised customers this summer when they entered Oh! Susannah to find a woman working a radial arm saw in Capri pants and bare feet.


Palmer adds shes noticed that customers here view her business differently than they did in California. Down there, she says, people walked into her store, saw her furniture, and said, No, theres no way you make this stuff. They even looked underneath dining room tables to make sure another companys name wasnt stamped there.


I told my dad that I noticed I didnt get the same surprised reaction from people up here, and he said, Thats because women in the Northwest actually work for a living.


Trial and error


Palmer works primarily with pinewood, because its cheaper and easier to work with than other woods, and she prefers its appearance. She also uses cedar and redwood occasionally. Her equipment includes a table saw, a radial arm saw, a planer, and sanders. She reads woodworking magazines to learn additional skills and get tips for new ideas.


A lot of it is just trial and error, she says.


Thanks partly to exposure from her Web site, Palmer has shipped inventory throughout the country and as far as Germany.


She says a sizable portion of her customers are on the East Coast, and that theres high demand in the South for her white picket-fence beds. She currently is working on making tables and chairs for a restaurant in San Diego.


Those tables have tapered legs and stained-finish tabletops with flowers painted on them.


She says shes starting all over again in terms of building her business in the Inland Northwest, and that her best allies are word-of-mouth advertising and Internet sales.


In the past few months, more people have been starting to travel to her store from Idaho, and a woman plans to drive several hundred miles to Spokane from the middle of that state to pick up furniture next month.


Oh! Susannahs location on highly-traveled Northwest Boulevard also helps boost business, especially during rush hour when drivers are sitting through stand-still traffic, Palmer says.


I get nothing but looky-loos, and thats played a huge part in people coming back to visit the store, Palmer says. I hear horns honking all the time, and Ill look outside to find that people have been looking into my store windows and havent noticed that traffic has started moving.


Palmer plans to venture into the consignment furniture market and has been considering a few opportunities in the Post Falls area.


She also has expanded into the wholesale furniture business since moving to Spokane. She displayed items in September at Morning Star Boys Ranchs Idle Wheel Fall Show and plans to do similar shows in the future. Palmer currently is building a child-sized table and chair set for the Spokane Advertising Federations A Red Shoe Event charity auction in December. That table will feature a plaid table top and olive-green-and-pink miniature chairs.


Palmer also is redecorating her home in Spokane using Oh! Susannah Furniture, and Better Homes & Gardens has expressed interest in doing an article about that when shes done.


That magazine featured her San Diego home in an article about bargain-style decorating a few years ago and has included her furniture in other articles as well.


As for the stores name, Palmer says she always thought someday shed own a clothing store named Oh Susannah. Once she decided to start a furniture business that focused on country-looking styles, she told a friend about the idea, and the friend suggested she include an exclamation mark to name it after the old folk song. She says customers usually dont spell it correctly, and confuse her name with the stores name, but it was a good choice because people dont forget it.


Ill be walking down the street and customers will run into me and say, Oh! Hi, Susannah, and we get a good laugh out of it.