Lately I’ve been making a big effort to improve the decor in the dining room. For months I was focused on a particularly perplexing puzzle—how to fill the eight-inch-high space between the mantelpiece and the large painting (of cows!) hanging above it. I spent many …
October is a magical month here in North Florida. The temperatures are pleasant, the leaves and grass are still green, and the meadows, vacant lots, and roadsides are abloom with yellow and purple wildflowers. After the long, hot, hard summer, the world seems fresh and …
Last Saturday, Mom, my sister Bunny, and I met in nearby Havana to do a little antiquing. Mom and Bun just wanted to have fun, but I, on the other hand, hoped to conduct some serious business. I wanted to find furniture for the new crafting space I’m trying to create in the Little House, the small outbuilding that currently serves as my (and Rob’s) home office.
I got to Havana first, and when Mom and Bun finally arrived, I ran up to them in the street and said, all in a rush, “I must come clean. I have an agenda today! I’m trying to turn my side of the Little House into a cute crafting space, and I need to find a number of pieces of furniture to make it happen!”
“What sort of look are you going for?” Bunny asked. “What are you picturing?”
“Well,” I said, “right now the Little House is really boring and ugly. I want it to be magical and enchanted, like the Enchanted Tiki Room at Disney World, or Ella’s Deli! I mean, I know I can’t afford to have actual animatronics, but, still, I want it to be full of delights and neat things to fire your imagination. ”
“Like what? Give me an example,” Bun said.
“Oh, like cute vintage marionettes and mobiles, and parasols hanging upside down from the ceiling!”
“But what about the actual furniture? What are you hoping to find today?”
“Well, I’m picturing a long table for me to work at, with a wall shelf above it. The wall shelf would be a great place to hang some of the marionettes.”
“And what will be on the shelf?”
“Toys from my toy collection—teddy bears wearing dresses, jewelry, and hats, etc.”
“I see.”
“I’m so excited,” I said. “I can’t wait to be surrounded by all these wonderful things. My new crafting space is going to be such a happy, inspiring place. I’m probably going to be talking about it a lot today! You’re probably going to get an earful!”
Bun and Mom were very supportive. All day they listened to me dream aloud about the crafting space, and they kept their eyes peeled for long tables and wall shelves. We never did find either of those items, but we did find an awesome old primitive pine desk at the Antique and Design Center. After a whole lot of deliberation, I decided maybe a desk would work instead of a table, and I bought it! I planned to set up my computer on the desk and then just kind of move the keyboard and monitor aside when I was I ready to craft. The top of the desk is nice and big, with plenty of room to work.
The desk was delivered on Tuesday, and I spent the whole evening merrily setting it up in the Little House, rubbing it down with Natchez Solution and filling its drawers with various supplies. Now I’m one step closer to my dreamed-about crafting space. Maybe next I can find the wall shelf!
Here are a couple of my semi-recent crafting projects. Teddy bears are my favorite subjects to paint!
I took last Friday off and had another long weekend. Hooray! “I have so much to do!” I said to Rob on Thursday night. “Well, you won’t be able to get to it all,” Rob warned kindly. “But I’m going to try!” I said. Here …
Last Monday at my lunch hour I ran over to Rabbit Creek, a great new antique mall in Tallahassee, and bought a rocking chair and footstool I’d had my eye on for a while. The owner of the booth where I found the chair was …
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.
I’ve been trying to improve the back bedroom again. Everywhere I’ve ever lived, I’ve enjoyed decorating the bedrooms most of all. I had a great bedroom when I was a kid, and I think I’m always trying to re-create the charm of that first place …
Last Friday after work, I embarked on a little decorating spree that lasted through Saturday evening. Around noon that day (Friday, I mean), I received in the mail a pair of vintage McCoy wall pockets—two sunny yellow ceramic flowers that I’d ordered off eBay. I …
This weekend we started redecorating our breezeway, attempting to turn it into a cozy open-air living room. We took everything out and washed the walls and the floor with buckets of warm soapy water. Then we drove up to Thomasville in search of some sort of primitive cabinet to serve as a focal point and bring some height to the area. The trip to Thomasville was really fun because we got to have Mexican food and French fries while we were there, and we spent a long time poking around in Relic’s, which is like some crazy old lady’s huge, dusty attic.
Relic’s really had some cool, creepy things. There were old chicken cages and garden statues, scary Victorian portraits, chandeliers, and seed cabinets. We ended up buying an old door-less pie safe for our screen porch. We had brought the wrong car for hauling it home, however.
Rob asked the owner if we could come back and pick up the pie safe the next weekend.
“We’d prefer you didn’t,” the lady said.
“But we don’t have the right car,” Rob said. “And we live an hour from here.”
“Ha! I drive farther than that to go out to dinner,” the lady countered.
“But it’s an hour home, then an hour back, then an hour home again,” Rob said.
“Well, listen to him whine!” the lady smiled at me. “Whine, whine, whine!”
I was laughing. She was really sticking it to Rob.
We had fun setting up our pie safe. I dug around in the closets and filled its shelves with rustic treasures—an old Herty turpentine cup, for instance, and a copper watering can. The cats were really excited; they love new furniture. There was soon a cat relaxing on each of the four shelves.
We bought some puffy, comfortable chairs and a loveseat at Lowe’s. We got all that set up on Sunday. Then I potted a new fern and filled some vases with non-toxic bouquets (the cats are always curious about bouquets, so I went with edible mint sprigs). We’re not done yet, but the breezeway is really coming together. It looks so cute and cozy at night with the lamp lighted and a bunch of cats sleeping on the soft chairs. It kind of reminds me of the Swiss Family Robinson tree house.