~Hunting Treasure and Refurbishing Furniture~
The last few weeks I have been busy getting ready for the "Holiday Open House" at our antique shop space coming November 11th. I don't know about you, but I find doing Christmas in October to be really weird! In retail and resale shops though, October is probably even a little late to be preparing for the holidays, but I try not to think about being behind too much!
Over the last month, I have been hard at work gathering some furniture, picture frames that I will turn into signs and chalkboards, decor pieces and some odds and ends to refurbish and re-sale in the shop so that the shop is nice and full for the holiday event. I do love to shop for furniture and treasure hunt! There is something about the anticipation of what you will find and the creativity that happens during this process. I thought it would be fun to gather up what I've found so far and take pictures to show you all! I will tell you that the furniture is packed in my workshop (aka my garage) right now so you can't see one of the dressers that we picked up at a garage sale.
In our area of Northwest Arkansas, the garage sales I love are neighborhood garage sales. In a radius of 3 miles where I live, multiple neighborhoods have their garage sales at one time. A few weeks ago, there were 5 neighborhoods that had theirs on the same weekend! SCORE!!! :)
When we first moved to the area 5 years ago, we lived in a different neighborhood about a mile away. Of course, some of our first friends where neighbors there and as we happened to visit the garage sale across from our old house we got a chance to catch up with 3 different family friends! One of those neighbors had a large 5 ft+ dresser that they just gave to me! He even delivered it in his truck to my house! They are truly such sweet and generous people! Unfortunately, my garage is so packed, that you can't see the dresser that was gifted to me very well in the photos.
But never fear, we will feature the rehab soon!
It's the long dresser with the chair on top! It also came with two mirrors that we will sell individually, as I don't care for dressers with attached mirrors.
Unless, you can hit neighborhood garage sales like that one, it does take some valuable time to find things that are the right style, but in fairly good shape to refurbish. Over the years, I have gotten to be good at finding the right pieces. When I look for furniture, I want to buy real hard wood. This is so valuable in today's furniture market because a great deal of what we buy is not real wood and we are paying big bucks for those pieces. The beauty of buying real wood is the longevity of the piece. What I find so interesting about furniture, is that you can imagine the generations of homes that the piece of furniture has lived. Not only can a piece of hard wood furniture last a life time, but you can easily change the finish and give it new life or style to fit your needs. As I've told you before, a lot of the pieces I find are damaged with small dings or scratches that affect the surface. When a piece is damaged like that, I can easily fix it, which makes the price point low enough to still sell the piece at a great price to my customers.
Here is a look at some of our 'trash to treasure' finds that we have at this point!
I will be making a lot of handmade items for the shop to go with all of the refurbished pieces and I will show you the end result in a few weeks. My total investment in what you see, which is 2 dressers, an armoire, a sofa table, frames, and various odds and ends, is $110.00! No, you didn't read that wrong! This dresser with casters, even though pretty beat up was one of my favorites and it was only $10.
When I asked the guy to repeat the price, I was sure I was mistaken!
Literally, I felt kind of guilty because I felt it was a steal at that price! :)
My first refurbish project, out of my finds, was this sofa table this week.
I sanded the top down to the bare wood, as it had a lot of surface damage, and painted it a soft gray with light distressing on the edges. The piece had some really nice detail and for some reason it looked bigger once it was painted.
I went ahead and put it in the shop on Wednesday this week, since I needed to refresh the shop space and add some new decor pieces. Here are a few more close up pics of the table so you can see the painted finish and detail.
I'm excited to get everything ready for Christmas this year! The theme for Daisies & Olives antique mall, where we have our shop is a "Woodland Christmas". I had already decided on a "Vintage Christmas" theme for our shop this year so I will incorporate both themes into one and call it good! The next piece I will be re-furbishing is the blond knotted pine armoire you saw in the "treasure" pictures. I'm going to use this for all of our Christmas pillows that Nancy, my mother in law, has been diligently preparing for the event. She always makes the most wonderful pillows for the holidays! I will get to see them next week and can't wait!
Until next time....keep on keeping on!
