Doctor’s Cabinet

On Saturday I made a new improvement to the back bedroom. When Rob went out to get his hair cut, I ran up to Bainbridge, Georgia, and bought an old doctor’s cabinet I’d seen at Sharon House Antiques.

Bainbridge is a little town 20 miles north of Quincy. Getting there involved a pleasant drive through the country. I passed pecan orchards, Lady Moon Farms (a big organic farm), and the FAMU Research and Extension Center (260 acres of farmland, pines, and lakes). The road was bordered on both sides by banks of brilliant, sun-drenched goldenrod.

Bainbridge is such a cool little place, with oak-shaded streets, charming old homes, and a thriving downtown with a lovely green park at its heart. Just across from the park, which features a fountain and a Victorian gazebo, is Sharon House Antiques. The shop is a treasure trove, jam-packed with china, glittering glassware, paintings, carpets, furniture, and even glamorous old evening gowns!

As I browsed around the shop, another customer exclaimed, with a dazzled, deliriously happy expression, “Oh, wow, this is just like . . . sensory overload to me! There’s so much to see!”

“I know,” I said. “Don’t you love it?”

“Oh, I do!” she said.

Once I had made my purchase, I had to carry the quite heavy and extremely unwieldy doctor’s cabinet down the sidewalk by myself and hoist it into my car without looking like I was struggling. I don’t think I was successful; I was definitely struggling. I sailed back home, then had to get the cabinet into the house by myself since Rob wasn’t there. Believe me, I had plenty of trouble carrying the cabinet in. Cats escaped. The word crap was said. The screen door kept closing in my face until I tied it open with a jump rope.

I ran into some more difficulties when I began setting up my new purchase. I managed to get it up on the old red desk in the back bedroom, but it was top-heavy and unstable. To prevent it from toppling over, I tried a million schemes that failed, including “gluing” it to the desk with museum wax and stacking bricks on the bottom shelf to act as a sort of ballast. Finally, I ended up securing the cabinet to the wall behind it with screws and wire. Ha ha. I was dealing with that cabinet all day long.

I kept hitting more snags and finding myself in some new pickle.

“Oh, shucks, why did I buy this dang cabinet?” I said to myself at one point, when I realized it was leaning to one side. The floor was slanted, I discovered, so I had to put some little feet under two legs of the desk to level the desk and the cabinet.

The problems kept coming, but luckily, in the end, I solved all them all. By around 7 that evening, the cabinet wasn’t wobbly anymore. It wasn’t crooked. It was adding some nice height to the desk and providing handy storage space for tea cups and other small, cute props that I use in my toy photography hobby.

I was really tired when I went to bed that night. The last thing I saw before I closed my eyes was the cabinet gleaming softly in the lamplight and looking just like I had hoped it would when I set off for Bainbridge that morning.

I think this post needs at least one more picture, so here’s a shot of a painting I finished recently. The composition isn’t my own; I followed a tutorial I found on YouTube.