New Old Furniture

Every day I get an email from that site My Habit, which is an offshoot of Amazon.  It sells high-end clothing, furniture, and household goods at great prices.  But I find it dismaying that so many of these items are still made in China.  Like this very cool little acrylic end table, normally $1300, and on sale for $330 (woo-hoo!), but made in China!  I could go to Ross and get cool little tables that are made in  China and cost about $40.  So I'm annoyed.  What I've been doing instead is haunting eBay and a very fun store in Fairfield called The Trading Post. It's got a fair amount of junk , but if you look around a bit, there is a lot of really beautiful old furniture. And it's huge!  I can get lost in there for ages.

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I feel like old furniture that isn't officially antique (isn't antique supposed to be 100 years old?), that shows that it has been well loved and is now hanging out in a used furniture store, is kind of the shelter dog of the furniture world.  Perfectly good, an excellent addition to the family, but just needs someone to take a chance on it.  (And speaking of shelter dogs, our new baby is such a sweetheart.  So gentle, so loving,  always wagging, and there was only that one time where she jumped up on the coffee table and pranced across....)

At The Trading Post last spring I found a little old solid mahogany bookcase for the upstairs hallway and it still had the sticker on the back from a San Francisco furniture store from many years past.  Then this past summer, we needed a new dresser.  As you well know, finances ain't what they used to be.  So since I absolutely, unequivocally refuse to buy anything from Ikea (no--don't get me started.  I'll rant and also perhaps rave.), I went to the Trading Post again and found a very nice dresser.  It was tired and scratched, but it was solid wood and it was not much more than $100.  Sold!  I loaded it up in the back of my little wagon and brought it home.  The picture at left is not the exact dresser--I forgot to take a snap (remember when people like your grandparents called photographs "snaps"?) before we made it pretty, but this is very close to how it looked.  So anyway, we (the royal "we") removed the ugly old hardware and then gave it a good sanding.  The drawers smelled a bit musty, so I put little bowls of bleach in each drawer then closed the drawers and left it for a few days (a Martha Stewart tip).  Problem solved.  We then painted it a semi-gloss white, put on new hardware, and called it good.  It looks great.

In October, I went on the Solano County surplus auction site and found all sorts of interesting things (filing cabinets, bookshelves, stretchers, gun holsters...).  Most interesting of all, however, was a chair from the 1950s, solid walnut, built by a company from North Carolina called Boling.  And then at the beginning of December I saw two more of these chairs on the same site.  Needless to say, all three have been adopted into our home. They are hard wooden chairs, but they are somehow very, very comfortable.  So of course, once I had the three chairs, one in the living room and the other two in the family room, the pair needed a table to go with them.  I went to eBay and looked and looked for a small wooden table, preferably dropleaf, to go with them.  Well, if it wasn't "pick-up only" in Pennsylvania, it was $90 shipping, so that didn't work.  No surprise, I went to The Trading Post and found exactly the table I was looking for.  It's a little dropleaf occasional table, probably from the 1940s, priced very reasonably, and it goes perfectly with my Boling chairs.  No, the woods don't match (the table is maple), but they are an excellent complement to each other. The picture shows the table with one leaf up and one down, and it is just perfect!

While buying old furniture won't make more jobs in furniture factories, it will support local, small, non-chain businesses, which I can't advocate strongly enough.  So I got new (to me) furniture at an extremely doable price, and I didn't buy the Chinese-made...umm...crap that we are deluged with and will probably end up in the landfill before too long.  I certainly can't imagine any furniture from Ikea or Target lasting more than about five years, let alone 70.  In the future, what on earth will antique stores sell?