ReadyMade: Instructions for everyday life

In my last post, I talked to you about my crazed and frantic attitude toward accomplishing our goals and getting to just live in our new house without feeling like a complete slave to the situation.  For me, at the moment, my goals are focused on the walls throughout the house.  There are many other things we intend to change eventually (light fixtures, flooring, cabinets. . .), but for now I just want to paint each room a color that I can live with.  With that goal accomplished, I can hang art on the walls, finish unpacking some of our more delicate possessions, and fill rooms with fantastic furniture (some that we already posses and some that we have yet to stumble upon) while we wait to get our hands on the magic pot of money that will help fix the light fixtures, flooring, and cabinets.  Today, I’m going to focus on furniture.

In Garth’s last post, he turned you on to some of the approaches we are taking to surviving and accomplishing the renovation of our house.  Though we are focusing on the walls at the moment (and, oh, how much trouble the walls are by themselves), we have been spending our Saturdays popping from garage sale to garage sale in an effort to acquire some things we need to fix the house as well as some things we need to furnish the house at prices that our small wallets can handle.  Beyond simply garage sale shopping, we have also been hitting up local thrift stores, antique stores, flea markets, and following Craigslist as if it our lives depended on it.  By being fairly diligent, we have amassed a grand collection of useful tools that we could never afford at full price and we have stumbled upon some great furniture finds that either require some work on our part or none at all.

Garth and I came to this house with a variety of interesting furniture.  Some things will work in the space wonderfully and others need to be replaced– errr upgraded– to suit our new, more adult surroundings.  The living room, especially because it is already painted, has been a source of furnishing concern for me since we pulled the last bit of masking tape from the trim.  We already knew we would be ditching our Ikea t.v./bookcase in the move and our couches, though very interesting, were simply not comfortable enough to try and incorporate into the new decor.  I did my minimally twice daily check of Craigslist furniture listings and wandered through various sales and used item stores in search of suitable furnishing.  Beyond this I am constantly trolling through design and decorating blogs for inspiration (Design Sponge and Apartment Therapy are among my favorites).  Because I have the crazy idea that I can learn and do just about any task that I need to, I was not fearful about buying furniture that needed some refining.  I haven’t gotten to an upholstery project yet, but I did find an upholstery tool kit at the thrift store!

Here are a few items we have acquired for very reasonable prices that need some help:

1.  We found this hutch at the thrift store for $15.  Immediately we were attracted to the nice, clean lines and the subtle curve of the bottom drawered part.  Our intention?  To remove the single glass door, change the door pulls, and paint the entire piece a solid color that will pop in our green room.  It will no longer be for displaying dishes, it will hold our t.v and related multi-media materials.

2.  This crazy hallstand was for sale at a garage sale of antiques.  I had to fight a lady for it and ended up getting it (and free delivery!) for around $100.  It needs to be stripped of all the green paint (this is half done in the photo), refinished, the mirror it came with needs to be cut down, and we want to adjust the size of the seat/storage bin (it doesn’t quite fit where want it– one danger of having to buy things on the spot).

3.  We have tons of books.  Tons.  Whenever we can find good, wooden shelves we get excited.  I have three different shelves of varying sizes that have needed to be stripped, sanded and repainted.  Unfortunately I don’t have before photos of them because I am a maniac and painted them as soon as they made it to the backyard.

4.  A white, slightly formal, cough from Craigslist.  For $75 this couch is great, but it will be one of my reupholstery projects.

5.  This $5 garage sale chair will also get an upholstery makeover.

We have also found a few items that required no work on our part, these feel like especially grown up purchases and anytime we walk into a room and see them we congratulate each other on our good taste and bargain hunting.

The first of these is a gorgeous Danish Modern display shelf/china cabinet that we picked up at a local antique store for $300.  This is one of our more pricey items, but it would cost waaay more than that brand new (even Ikea shelves can cost more than that).

The second thing is a fantastic couch.  When we moved in we brought with us my set of blue fur furniture that I picked up for a song at a thrift store in Kansas City six years ago.  They are fun, but it was time for a change.

In my design website hunts I came across this couch from Anthropologie that I thought would look fantastic in our green room.

The $5,998 price tag (plus $300 shipping) made that particular couch completely out of the question.  However, the idea was in my brain and a month later we stumbled upon this couch at a local antique store.

The owner let us make two payments to cover the $900 sale price and suddenly we had a very grown-up couch (crammed in a room with the white couch and the blue fur set).

We posted our groovey fur furniture on Craigslist and in a couple of days a lovely couple bought them and took them away.  We applied that money towards our couch purchase and felt especially thrifty.

Recently we also managed to secure an beautiful Danish Modern dining room table and chairs from Craigslist.  This was our most expensive purchase to date at slightly over $1,000.  The owner has let us pay him off slowly, which is extremely generous.  We are hoping to move the set in this weekend as we just got our First Time Homeowner’s check.  Unfortunately we won’t have an image of this gem until it is in our possession, but believe me, you will be seeing it soon.

So, these are our furnishing triumphs up to this point.  We certainly can’t afford (nor do we want to) run out to Pottery Barn or Pier One and try to furnish our place in one quick swoop.  I am content to let this portion of our home be a slowly evolving process, I enjoy the hunt and the reward when something is just right.

The walls, however, are a different story.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 28th, 2009 at 12:04 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.