It all started with his grandfather’s old rusty fan.

And over three years later, it’s now a pride-filled passion to Winston Yancey Jr.

Yancey, the owner of Sky’s Restoration in Dillwyn, has brought life back to numerous old appliances and household items, which has resulted in smiles on his customer’s faces.

Yancey founded his side business in 2012, naming it after his daughter, Savannah Kaye Yancey, or “Sky.”

For a time before he started his business, based outside of his house, the 45-year old Buckingham native worked on prototypes and small jobs for himself.

Yancey calls his restoration abilities a God-given gift.

“The first thing I did was an old fan, a box fan that my dad gave me that was probably 40 years old or so,” Yancey said.

It took him about a half-day to restore his first job. “It looked pretty cool, you know, but I really didn’t think nothing of that one. But then, when I did another one that was completely rusty, and it looked horrible, after I did that one, then I was shocked. …”

Yancey said he gets a lot of satisfaction out of his work, and said it’s never easy.

“I had to prove what I could do,” he said of his abilities and working on his own appliances before going into business.

Once he’s completed a job, the result sometimes freaks him out, he said. “It’s like magic.”

Yancey has two sources of inspiration in bringing crisp colors back to rusted antiques: his father, the Rev. Winston Yancey Sr., and Rick Dale, the host of “American Restoration” on The History Channel.

The elder Yancey told his son that if he was going to do something to do it right. “You either do it as good as the best or better than most,” his father advised him.

Yancey said to work as a perfectionist was good for the customer, but a curse on himself. “I can never be suited. I really haven’t done anything yet that was perfect to me. It was perfect to the people I did it for, but to me it’s never perfect.”

His restoration skills have reached all the way to Norfolk from his backyard, where a man wanted a washing machine restored.

“You’ve got to be creative, and everything’s got to be well-balanced, you know,” he said.

On Facebook, where Yancey does most of his publicity, he’s got over 18,000 followers — a testament to his skill and passion to bring people’s treasures back to life.

This is a corrected version of the original story, revised on Sept. 11.