Buying “project” furniture

Ever since Troy finished this project*, Lorena has been busting my chops.

She says, “Why can’t you be more like Troy.”

I say, “Well to start with, he has a lot more hair than me…”

Thick in the head though I tend to be, after over a year in our new house, I have come up with a plan that could bring a us some missing joy, peace, and furniture.  When we moved to North Carolina, we were able to buy a house that is two good sized rooms larger than the one we owned in Oregon.  Those rooms are very, very painful to Lorena.  I think some people are born with a decorating gene that some others of us lack.  Lorena can hardly stand the site of an empty room.  The problem is that, with the tight economy and its associated insecurities, it is hard to know how to deal with the problem in a financially responsible way.

All of the members of our little family are much, much happier when we have a project on which to work.  That is particularly true when the end of the projects leaves us something to admire and enjoy.  Shortly after Lorena and I got married, we stripped and repainted an old white dresser that my sister, Jean helped me buy at a thrift store when I first moved to Corvallis to work at a now defunct robot company name Intelledex.  We found maple under the ugly white paint.  We sanded it and put some lacquer on it.  We did not do a perfect job because there were some fairly minor defects about which we could not do much.  Still, it is a beautiful, sturdy, and serviceable piece that we LOVE.  A big chunk of that love is due to the fact that we did it ourselves.  We have refinished a table and a couple of other pieces deriving great joy from each one.

It is possible to buy pieces that are worthy of restoration.  We even have an old chair from my college days and a rocking chair given to us buy a dear friend from our Florida (Earl Shuck) days.  When he got cancer, he told his wife that he wanted us to have that chair when he died.  We value it greatly.   Lorena has been wanting to restore those pieces for a long time.  We now have to decide whether to buy some stuff that we be more fitting to put in our empty rooms, take on the college chair with a kind of restoration we have never tried (we have done wood refinishing, but not reupholstering), or just start cruising garage sales and consignment stores until something obvious pops up.  I vote for the garage sale/consignment store option, but I am not the boss of this effort.  I will leave that for the unnamed person in our household of strong opinons about these subject.  I found it is safest just to follow or stay out of the way when these kinds of decisions are required.

Lorena has accumulated a list of consignment stores.  Maybe she can get Youngin to go with her.  I think that might even be a Troy kind of thing.  I think Christian, Kelly, and I might work on the radio, crafts, Betty Blonde, and homeschool while we let Lorena do the exploring.  We will keep you posted.

*I had to rifle through a LOT of posts to find the one with the tables on Troy and Youngin’s blog.  It does not seem like it was so long ago that they started the thing and they have compiled quite a record of their activities.  It dawned on me as I was looking through it that they have a GREAT blog.  There is lots of good stuff there.  I vote that they do not forget both more bird posts and more food posts, both with pictures.  Congrats you guys!