Old Furniture - Antiques~

Every now and then, David and I splurge on an antique - you know, the kind of furniture you don't find in an old barn or buy for a few bucks from a roadside junk dealer - we fell in love with this next piece shortly after we moved into this house. We saw it in our favorite antique store but couldn't really justify a splurge in the amount they were asking for - after all we were dealing with the aftermath of our previous owners employing roofers who were good plumbers (and guys who cut main support beams under a bathtub instead of moving the plumbing over a bit). A year or so later, we saw they still had the piece and for the same price - we offered half of that and when the owner bit, we jumped.

This next one we splurged on last year when we helped out the economy by buying our first flat screen TV.....I'd procrastinated on replacing our fat TV with its high pitched squeal for months because I couldn't decide what to use as an entertainment center in this old farmhouse - nothing seemed to be "just right" until we suddenly hit on the idea of an old sideboard.

Since I have a dry sink in my dining room and a side board in my living room, and old bureaus spread throughout the house where ever they can best serve our family's needs, it probably won't come as much of a surprise to see that I don't mind mixing periods of furnishing.....this was labeled a "Victorian Coffee Table" in the antique dealers showroom - all I cared about was the stain and the scale of it.

After buying our lazy boy couch and chairs a few years back (in its old fashioned fabric), I needed to find a "to scale" coffee table for the narrow living room - one that looked like it went with the couch and chairs. It took me 2 years to find it (meanwhile we lived without). I've never before in my life put a piece of furniture on a credit card, but I did it that time. It needed to be small (this one is) and it needed to be sturdy to stand up to wagging tails and wiggling bodies of the four dogs that crowd us for attention when we eventually sit down to watch TV in the evenings (and this one has).

I have been looking for the right end table(s) for the past three years - I used my Longaberger Laundry Basket with its lid turned upside down beside on of the chairs and placed the other one next to the green bureau during my search. The same issue had to be dealt with as with the coffee table - it had to be scale and it had to be sturdy. I knew kind of what I wanted but just never found anything - so we made do.

When we rearranged the living room last fall, I continued to use the laundry basket between the two chairs. David inherited the table in the photo from his mother recently and although its scale is just a tiny bit off, it looks as close to perfect between those chairs as anything I've seen during my three year search. Perhaps it was meant that I couldn't find anything........