Since 2012, Karen Thomas had worked a dream job as the historian of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. She chronicled the school’s centennial, wrote two books and met many of the most influential leaders in global public health.

She expected to remain at the university until she retired. Yet the Southwest Baltimore resident also built other sources of income, a lesson she said stemmed from her 2011 divorce. In recent years, she turned a pandemic hobby of touching up and reselling vintage furniture into a side business.

That planning soon proved important: As Hopkins faced budget constraints, Thomas was laid off in July.

Losing her job was a bitter disappointment, but the 56-year-old said she was grateful to have laid the groundwork for a career pivot.

Now Thomas is a full-time entrepreneur who restores and resells old furniture through her small business, Fine Furniture Finders. She has begun the process of obtaining a business license and forming an LLC.

Furniture restoration “has a lot of flexibility, it’s fun, it uses my history knowledge and I make money,” Thomas said.

“I always saw myself as a nerdy academic that couldn’t possibly be successful in a business. And then I realized that wasn’t true.”

As a starting point, I’m wondering how you ended up as a historian at a public health school.

I got my Ph.D. in U.S. history from the University of North Carolina in 1999. It’s one of the best U.S. history programs in the country. And I struggled so hard — I sent out over 100 resumes and cover letters and basically was un- and under-employed for about seven years or eight years.

I had the ability to write an institutional history, and I also had a really good background in the history of medicine and public health. So I applied for a postdoctoral fellowship at Johns Hopkins in the history of medicine department at the medical school. And to my great surprise, I did get the job.

What did your job entail?

I was hired by Johns Hopkins to write a history of the School of Public Health for the centennial celebration, which was in 2016. They wanted a footnoted, full-on academic history of the school, which I did write and publish.

I pitched and got to do a monthly lecture series on the history of the school during centennial year, and I did about 100 oral history interviews total with some of the greatest figures in 20th-century public health.

It was awesome. It was the best job in the world. I absolutely loved my job.

What happened in July? Why was your position eliminated?

I think it was simply a budgetary decision by the school’s leadership that I understood, even if I was sad about it.

I was notified in early May, and my last day was July 17.

My last day was actually really nice. We had a team retreat, which I went to, and we had a goodbye lunch for me after the retreat was over. And I got some vases with dried flowers pressed into the glass [to give to] each of my colleagues to say goodbye.

Learning that I was being laid off was pretty terrifying and awful, but the actual last day was as good as I could ask for.

So when did you start restoring vintage furniture? And why?

In 2020, it was the pandemic, and my son and I sometimes would go on a drive just to get out of the house. And the only thing open in any of the towns that we went to was the gas station and the Goodwill. So I just went in, and one day I saw this little table for five bucks. And I decided, well, I’m going to buy that and see if I can do anything with it.

I just started selling on a couple of websites, and now I’ve been doing that for five years. I’m completely self-taught. I just watched a lot of YouTube and kind of experimented and made a lot of mistakes and made a lot of kind of ugly furniture before I could do it right. But it worked out.

Did your background in history help you at all with with what you’re doing now?

Absolutely. I really focus on mid-20th-century furniture. That’s the exact same period I did history on, except now I’m researching furniture brands and things like that.

I write amazing listings. You want to tell the story of the piece and why it’s worth something, why it’s really cool, and why it’s not like anything else they’re gonna see. And that definitely uses history skills.

I saw that you’re in the process of starting a business, Fine Furniture Finders.

It’s up and running. Everything happens in my house and out in my backyard. I‘m already selling stuff online, but I just want to make it my full-time source of income and scale it to where I can hire people.

I’m trying to be the Uber Eats of vintage furniture where you tell me, “I would like a 1960s sofa with flowery upholstery for about $500,” and then I say, “Got it.”

What do you feel like this past year has taught you?

Basically, it turned out to be OK to have to leave my job. It was unexpected but turned out to be very positive. And it forced me to get started on something at least 10 years early that I planned to do later anyway.

This interview has been lightly edited for clarity and concision.

The headline for this story has been updated to reflect that Karen Thomas was laid off from Hopkins, not fired.