Two of the most amazing things I've thrifted in a long time

Hello friends, I just wanted to do a quick post on two things I've thrifted recently that are too amazing not to show you. I know many of you are inveterate thrifters and don't need to be told that scores like these are not everyday occurrances. I go to thrifts almost every day but rarely do I come out of there with stuff this good. But I do go often because 90% of the time thrifting is all about being in the right place at the right time, and if you're not in the place at all, that amazing piece will be going home with someone else.

(And I would be a happy camper indeed at this point if I could thrift myself a brand new camera...bear with me because my ancient camera has not been working that well and making blogging in general very difficult!)

Last week I wrote about some of my good thrifting luck and promised to show you the non-Pyrex finds. Well, these are the big things, and later I'll get to the small things.

Thank goodness I have kids or I would have a really hard time explaining why I bought this amazing chair.

Because I totally would have bought it even if I didn't have small people to fit in it.

It is a vinyl upholstered rocking chair, in amazing condition- not a rip or scratch on it. It was more than I usually like to pay at $25, but still, I fell so hard for this I probably would have paid more. I can just see a kid sitting in it in the 1950s watching cartoons or TV westerns. And that is exactly what my kids are doing with it today. Aren't those little diamond details amazing? (and amazing that they survived the years intact!)

And speaking of Western, I found this vintage 1920s Navajo rug in a thrift store! For $20!

I have wanted one of these for ever. I looked for a long time several years ago when we were decorating our living room the first time (see the current look here) before not finding any in my price range. It is huge too, about 4x6. Problem is, now our decorating scheme is more 50s modern/kitsch than the rustic/western look it was before. So I don't know if I will keep it or sell it to finance a new camera. What would you do?

Oh Danny Boy, the Thrifts, the Thrifts are Calling....

After my hectic couple of weeks, I realized that I needed some retail therapy.  I have about 2 hours to myself on Thursdays while my daughter is at school, and today I definitely wanted to hit the thrifts!

It was a very good decision!

And I actually had a good reason to go- we've been busy preparing things to go up to our cabin in a few weeks, and part of that is moving our old TV and entertainment center up there. This is a huge, heavy piece of oak furniture, and something that is dated in this age of wall-mounted TVs. We've been wanting to rid our living room of this for years, and planning to bring up my father-in-law's 1959 hi-fi console in its place. Which we did last night.

Problem is, the entertainment center also housed a component stereo system, which I use all the time to play my LPs. Moving the EC meant that the stereo now has no home. So my husband actually asked me to go out shopping to find something we could use to hold the stereo. Yes, he actually told me to go thrift shopping! (And boy howdy, you don't need to ask me twice to do that!)

I happen to know exactly what I want to use for the stereo- a 1950s record cabinet, the kind with some shelves to hold records and components, in blonde wood with tapered legs and glass door. (Yes, I have a specific mental image of what I want to get.) But as we all know, you can't just go out and buy one of those at the thrift store. You have to keep going until you find it. So I knew I needed something temporary, but not throw-away.

My first stop of the morning was a converted Goodwill (now religious-run) in town, that I have had some good luck at. They price things fairly well and seem to have a good selection. I headed first to the housewares and spied this immediately:

A Cosco kitchen cart, $8.

 It will hold all the stereo items in style until I find what I really want. Then I can use it on the patio or the kitchen. With that need taken care of in the first 5 minutes, I was free to wander the store (minus the squeaky cart, which I left at the register.)

I want to thank the lovely MaryDeluxe for pointing out vintage jewelry boxes to me :). It had never occurred to me that these were even out there, but apparently they can be worth some $. Something to look out for! I love this one- very masculine- and got it for $1.

I had some more time and decided to brave the local Sally Ann. This store is only a couple of miles from me and is huge- probably over 10K square feet. I think it used to be a Kmart. It really is that big! You'd think it would be a slam dunk, that I'd be there every week, but no. It just hasn't paid off for me very much. Lots of smelly stuff and smelly people. 

But today I found a few gems, and in the housewares section. Other than the furniture section, which is miniscule, and the jewelry section, (which is non-existent- where does it all go?) the housewares section of this store is probably the worst.

This is a McCoy covered soup crock. If anyone is a McCoy expert , I'd love to know the pattern name. It was filthy, but in otherwise great shape. For $1.99, I figured I could use it or sell it.

I have never, ever, found Pyrex in this store, let alone a fridgie in great shape and in a pattern I collect. But there it was, a primary yellow 503 with the old-style lid for $3.99. It, too, was very dirty, but cleaned up nicely. I'm halfway there to completing the primary set!

This is the best find of the day, perhaps the year. Yes, it is jadeite, and not a repro. I think I must have knocked over a few babies and old ladies getting to it. It was $2.99. You're reading that correctly.

It's a large mixing bowl, and I happened to know exactly what it belongs to:

A perfect fit! Never did I think I would find it, and for only a couple of bucks. See, there really is treasure at the end of the rainbow!

A peek inside Chez QT: Kate's room

In my last post I mentioned I had a full bedroom set of Art Deco furniture. I wanted to take a moment to share it with you all, because it is really something special. It is in my daughter's room, and will be her furniture as she gets older.

This set consists of bed, nightstand, vanity, bench and high boy dresser. All the pieces match and are made of burl walnut and mahogany, with bakelite pulls on the drawers. I inherited them from a family member who passed away in 2005 at age 97. She had bought them new in the early 1930s. (Family lore says 1929, which is not out of the question, but to me the style is a few years later, and my relative would have been in her early 20s by that time. She would have just graduated from college with a degree in business- very unusual for a woman at the time- and had a very good job, even though it was the Depression.) The set is extremely high quality; the burl veneer is over solid mahogany with dovetailed joints. Since I am just the second owner, everything is in great condition.

This is the view as you walk in the door. The bed is a full size bed. At the far right is the vanity. You can see some of the detail in the veneer work.

The waterfall chifferobe on the left is a cedar closet. It is not part of the set, and is a few shades lighter. I bought that years before getting the rest of the bedroom set.

The nightstand. Kate's room has a "Vintage Rose" theme, so all the accessories, like the lamp and the art are rose. The wall color is a dusty rose (not as pink as it appears here). Hopefully it will grow along with Kate, who is almost 4, because it is a pain to move all this furniture to paint! :)

  

The vanity and bench. I like the tall tombstone-shaped mirror- it's not your usual round one. I recovered the bench with brown and gold Asian fabric- it originally had a needlpoint cover which was quite worn (but I still have in storage.) The crib is in the foreground and was hard to photograph around. In a few months that will be gone and Kate will be sleeping in the big bed.

The high boy dresser. You can really see how luminous the veneer is and the neat bakelite and brass pulls. This would have been the man's dresser (the woman got the vanity) and the top drawer has small lidded compartments for cufflinks, etc. My relative never married, so it was all hers! The bottom of the chest is actually two large doors which swing open, instead of a drawer. I suppose it would have been used for shoes or purses, but I keep my collection of quilts in there.

I love my Art Deco furniture, and if money was no object would likely have a house full of it. I hope you enjoyed this part of our tour!

Style Envy

I don't know about all of you, but sometimes I get a really bad case of house envy from looking at others' blogs. Perfectly put-together homes with consistent styles get me every time. Those homes also tend to be the polar opposite of what mine looks like - a carefully curated museum exhibit, rather than the museum storage room! Makes me want to sell everything on ebay and start fresh!

My house is such a hodge-podge of styles, sometimes I fell like it's everything and nothing all at the same time. I'm not sure if I could even limit myself to one particular style of decorating. But if I could, I would have a whole house of mid century modern decor. Or maybe vintage industrial. Or maybe cottage chic.... I guess that's the problem, really, I love it all!

Literally, I have all these styles and more in various rooms of my 1800 square foot house:

Shabby chic/cottage style:

Rustic Adirondack:

Mid Century Modern:

50's Atomic

40's cute

Art Deco:

At this point I think I'm too set in my ways and too much in love with all my stuff to ditch everything and start over. A lifetime of collecting vintage items will do that, I suppose. But it still doesn't deter me from dreaming about owning and furnishing a 1950s Eichler, or a 30s Frank Lloyd Wright, or an industrial loft, or....

What about you? Can you stick to one style or is it a mishmash?

Thrifted Thursday: 1950s atomic storage stool

As I noted in my previous post, I have been doing quite a bit of thrifting lately. I went to some of the usual places, and also one of my favorite places that I don't get to very often. It was there that I found something I've been looking for for some time- a vintage storage stool!

I love the upholstery; unfortunately it is vinyl and the top is cracked. I'll have to replace that some time. But the rest of it is in great shape. As you can see it matches my great trash-picked MCM black and white chair. I paid $10 for it, and I think that was a pretty sweet deal. 

Living in a Fishbowl

Well, I finally finished my TV-to-fish tank project. For those of you who are long time readers you may remember that I had a 1950 Motorola TV that I bought at a yard sale. It never worked, but the cabinet was nice solid mahogany, the speaker cloth was fine, and I knew it had potential.

I took the guts out of it- that picture tube was heavy! It had a few scratches (OK, gouges) and water marks on the top, so I had to refinish it. After my coffee-table makeover project earlier this summer, I knew this would be fairly easy.

Here's the 'before':

And the 'after'. Came out pretty well! I also restored the knobs with a little elbow grease and some black marker to color in the dial numbers (remember those? LOL).

But that was the easy part. The hard part was finding a fish tank that fit inside and that covered the whole porthole window. I finally found one at a yard sale this weekend for $3. It's actually a hermit crab tank, but it fits great and has a cover. I had trashpicked a filter pump and aerator from our neighbors and two seascape backdrops, so all that went inside as well. At some point I want to find a large black and white still from a vintage TV show to use as a backdrop, so it looks more like the TV is still playing a 1950s show. 

I had to buy some lighting for inside the tank. Since there is very little headroom, I decided to get a string of rope lighting and attached it to the inside upper edge. It's not real bright, but it does the trick- it was more important that the lights didn't get very hot.

We made a shelf out of plywood to fit on the rails that held the TV chassis and slid the new tank in.

It's hard to see, but we have two fish in there- Gomer Pyle and Barney Fife. One fish is white and the other black and white. My son is a huge fan of the Andy Griffith show, so hopefully we'll find a B&W photo from that show that we can use as a backdrop. (We lost our best fish, Nemo, earlier in the week, so he never made the move. RIP, Nemo.)

And lit up at night, with a Helmscene 3D TV lamp on top. (I must have taken 100 pix trying to get a good one, and this is the best of that lot. My camera stinks!) That is a vintage ad for the 1952 version of this TV on the table next to it. I used that for reference when putting the knobs back together.

Nov. 2011 update: I changed the background to a vintage test pattern, and added period rabbit ears and a UHF tuner:

It is definitely cool, and I think just about anyone with an old TV could do it, if I could!

Trash Picked Tuesday: MCM coffee table makeover!

A while back I did a post on this coffee table that my parents were throwing out. (Literally- it was at the curb and I trash-picked it from my own parents.) You may also recognize the country craptacular sofas that we got rid of by giving to my brother last fall. ;)

I had always liked it, but it was never very sturdy. The legs were always wobbly (I remember it being like that ever since I was little) and with the soft pine top, you could never get them to screw in tight. Plus, you can see how beat up the top was. 

Well, one night about 6 weeks ago the thing completely collapsed. Two of the four brackets that held the legs  just broke, and I could not find replacements at any of the big box home stores (big surprise).

So, now it was time for plan B. I searched the internet for replacement brackets and got sidetracked looking at some beautiful MCM coffee tables. Recognizing inspiration when it bites me on the foot, it occurred to me that hairpin legs would look spectacular with this top.

I found a little company in Ohio that makes nothing but hairpin legs in their shop, at www.hairpinlegs.com. I always try to buy American and buy from individual craftsmen and this was the perfect opportunity! They offer all different heights and finishes for their handmade hairpin legs, and the price is very reasonable. I ordered a set in natural steel and it arrived within a week.

I couldn't have been happier- they were perfect, and I knew the would be a lot sturdier than the wobbly original legs. Now I just needed to make the top beautiful again. 

After completely stripping the top and applying at least 8 coats of stain with a high gloss finish, I am very pleased with the result:

It is rock-solid- no chance of wobbling ever again!

My dad was over last night for a little belated Father's Day get together and was blown away by the table he had bought 40 years ago from a little craftsman in New Hampshire. We got him to write the name of the town and the date he bought it on the underside. As my brother and cousins will attest, it's something of a tradition for my dad to write the purchase date of things he buys on its owner's manual, so we thought this was pretty cool.  (As a bonus, you can see how we attached the legs!)

This coffee table will go back upstairs with our new MCM-inspired sofas, so watch for that post in the future.

Trash-picked Tuesday: Mid-Century Furniture Bonanza!

It's a happy coincidence of sorts, when you have a close relative moving into a new place (with no furniture) and some elderly neighbors getting ready to downsize. It's even better when that relative is your brother who has a fondness for 1960s and 70s mod and those neighbors are German emigres with spectacular taste.

And what could make the happenstance of circumstance even nicer is that my mom has no qualms at all about trash-picking the good stuff! (I told you that the trash-picking gene is inherited!)

So it came to pass that my brother found himself with a killer mid-century chair and incredible modern floor lamp over the weekend. Apologies for the backdrop in the photos; the items are in my parents' garage where my brother keeps his 1952 Army jeep.

The chair is upholstered in a salmon-colored curly wool. It's a very unusual fabric; I can't say I've ever seen anything like it except in a Persian lamb coat. A good cleaning should have it in good shape. The man who put it out by the curb said that his brother in Germany had made the chair by hand, and while he was kind of sorry to see it go, he was glad it was going to someone he knew.

 

This lamp is just wild. I don't know what to call it, but it has a 70's glam meets medical office feel.

Closeup of the hardware that adjusts the arms.. Everything is chrome and it is very heavy. I looked and couldn't find any maker's stamp on it- anyone who knows what it might be let me know!