Phase Two Continued

Where were we?

Oh yes, Phase Two.

The Recycle Phase: Paying actual money for other people’s junk.

The Key Players have been introduced: Facebook Marketplace, Estate Sales, Antique Stores, and Thrift Shops. You know the stakes are high in this phase because it’s truly a gamble.

Phase Three in the home-furnishing phase is when you start paying actual money for the stuff that just can’t be reasonably sourced any other way. It’s saved for last because it tends to be the boring, safe, and least satisfying route. Phase Two on the other hand is action-packed and seeped with all kinds of emotions.

Joy, Anger, Sadness, Love, Humiliation, and even… Fear! You’re dealing secondhand so you’re constantly weighing out opportunity costs, long term investment value, and you have to play the negotiation game.

In the last post, I shared about one of my proudest conquests of Phase Two so far. I scored a nearly new mattress and bed frame that perfectly matches my antique bedroom furniture set for a fraction of what I thought we would end up having to pay. These days I’m only home to eat a late dinner and sleep, so my beloved fridge find from Phase One and our new giant bed from Phase Two are very much treasured.

I have accumulated several other treasures from Phase Two, however, so I wanted to share them with you!

We’ll start in the kitchen and work our way through the main level.

One of my more random conquests is another that I appreciate daily! I was in an antique store in Corvallis looking for light fixtures for the dining/living rooms when I came upon a charming little hand-painted hanging lamp. It was only $30 so I decided to take it home. I’d found two hooks in the kitchen ceiling while painting and decided to leave them in hopes of one day finding a sconce for them and this little light seemed to be the perfect fit.

The greens in the painted flowers perfectly match my cabinets so it is the glue that holds the whole room together! We leave it on all the time so it’s the first thing I see welcoming me home when I drive up at night and the last thing wishing me well on my way in the morning.

An estate sale provided me with a lovely wool fringed rug to go in front of the sink along with a fabulous Rembrandt print with a dark wood frame that perfectly matches all of our trim.

Moving into the dining room, we have a gorgeous Queen Anne table set with 6 chairs and two removable leaves that I scored on Facebook marketplace for $200. I had scoured marketplace and sales for months looking for a durable set and I couldn’t have conjured up something more beautiful or better suited to the house.

The dining room is also home to a deco hutch I’ve been holding onto for a few years. It’s not the right style for this house, but it’s one of my favorite pieces so it’s going to serve as a placeholder until I come across something more era-appropriate. It’s filled with a red and gold set of china I got for next to nothing at an estate sale when Alex and I got married along with a bone china set I inherited from my mom on one of her downsizing escapades.

Presiding over the dining room, and the whole house frankly, are The Girls.

They have demanded their own blog post, but I can’t mention the dining room without mentioning its keepers. A 4ft by 2.5ft 1920s lithograph of Botticelli’s Primavera hangs over the deco hutch. The ornate frame is also a bit too deco for this house, but because it’s a very dark wood stain it looks like it belongs there.

Without sharing too many spoilers, I found this artwork at an antique store in December and it’s been bossing me around ever since. More on that next time.

When we bought the house there were two things I couldn’t WAIT to change. #1 was refinishing the hardwood floors. The second was the light fixtures. Basically, all of them are awful and inappropriate for the house, but the worst offenses were the fixtures in the dining/living rooms.

Hanging over the dining table was a 70’s brass “chandelier” that was about as romantic as a can of beans. Even worse was the 80’s ceiling fan in the living room with mix-match light shades. One of the shades had even been swapped out for a BUG ZAPPER. It was atrocious.

Thankfully Glenn, my hero, is great at swapping out light fixtures so when I texted him one day saying I had found better fixtures he was over the very next day to help me put them up. I wanted antique light fixtures that matched. I’d hoped for something from the 1940s, and I believe I’ll find the perfect set eventually, but for now, I was able to find a lovely set of cast iron chandeliers that were old, matching, and super affordable.

One of the gambles of Phase Two is opportunity cost. For the most part, I like to buy nice things that I can keep forever. I’m willing to make sacrifices in other areas to make it happen 90% of the time, but sometimes you have to either hold onto what you have or swap it out for an affordable placeholder. In this case, the hideous fixtures HAD to go ASAP, because the house was starting to get pretty vocal with its complaints.

At first, the house was just happy to have a loving family working on it and bringing some life back into it. Like with any relationship, after we got through the honeymoon phase, it started getting very comfortable making demands.

The light fixtures I had in my mind are surely out there, but I decided I’d rather seek them out when I had a little more room in my budget to get something sensational. So, as with our cooking stove, and the china hutch, we’ll let these cast iron lights stand in without a rush until we stumble upon the perfect items.

The living room has a lovely Karastan wool rug that I found for cheap on Facebook marketplace. Accompanying my great-great-grandmother’s couch and chair is a reclining 40’s a green velvet love seat and a gorgeous wooden coffee table from the antique store in Lebanon.

I initially bought the coffee table to turn into a fitting pedestal for my brides, but due to my vertical challenges, I would have had to cut the legs off. My grandma helped me refinish it and get it pretty. “If you cut the legs off of this beautiful table, can you at least wait until after I’m dead?” she pleaded. I couldn’t deny that it was too lovey a piece to dismember.

My favorite throw pillow is one that I made from a gorgeous thrifted embroidery! I found a black piece of silk that had a lovely parrot hand embroidered on it and loved him so much I decided to turn him into a throw pillow where he would be seen and enjoyed every day! The rest of the pillows are some that I made for that last house my mom lived in… I will be swapping them out for other colors when the right fabrics turn up.

Every room needs a conversation piece. The kitchen has its retro fridge, the dining room has The Girls, and the living room has The Lamps.

My most impulsive buy was a trio of antique hurricane lamps from Facebook marketplace. Usually, if it’s not an estate sale find I ruminate on a treasure for at least 48 hours before buying it. This is risky because secondhand items tend to go quickly and can’t just be tracked down again most of the time, so I do lose out on a lot of things, but it helps me avoid impulse buying and lets me weigh out alternative options.

In the case of the lamps, it was only an hour from the time I saw them, messaged the guy, and had them in the trunk of my car.

They are very ugly. But it's an ugly-cute like newborns and Volkswagen beetles. They are brass with delapotated paisley-print shades. There’s a floor lamp and two tabletops. I only have room for two in the living room, so the other one is upstairs, but what I love most about them is the way they distribute light. The shade splits the light so the wall gets smashed with two happy little ovals of light above and below the shade. They cozy it up dramatically!

You can’t enjoy the living room without noticing my collection of oversize art history books and Alex’s oversize geography books. These have all come from estate sales and thrift shops over the years and are the one thing we collect that could potentially get out of hand eventually.

Someday post-kids, I plan to turn one of the bedrooms into a library full of our picture books. We always take one or two on coffee dates at Hazella, and we do frequent Hazella often so we need a lot of art books so we don’t have to double back too often.

Lastly, the most randomly valuable item I thrifted for the living room for a meager sum of $45 was a stacking set of Japanese end tables. I was sewing at my shop when I got a strong urge to go into the lesser-known antique shop in Lebanon. I had actually forgotten it was there until my strange premonition!

I walked into the shop and the first thing in the door was this set of end tables that perfectly matches my Japanese jade & abalone screen! I couldn’t believe it! Those sets sell for $800+ online so $45 ain’t bad.

Moving on to our bedroom!

First, a wooden set of victorian frames that are now the conversation pieces for the room.

When Alex and I were on our cross-country camping trip last spring we decided to splurge on a hotel the get the most out of our New Orleans experience. We booked on hot-wire and ended up with a really fancy boutique hotel! You can imagine that after 10 days of living in our car, we were very entertained by the sight of a whole sparkling hotel room, fluffy clean towels, and bathrobes! We took silly portraits pretending to drink espresso out of their ridiculous tiny cups and champagne that cost more than the room out of the minibar. We put everything back, obviously, but it made for some hilarious portraits.

I aged them in photoshop by adding film grain and a little sepia tint, printed them off, and put them into the little frames I’d haggled for at the antique store. As stated before, Antique stores are the least appropriate avenues for haggling, but sometimes I’m willing to go off the principal, and for these gorgeous little frames that so perfectly match the furniture I have no regrets.

Next came the side tables, purchased along with the Japanese stacking set at the little antique store by my shop. They don’t appear to be very old, but they were the exact size and height I needed for the bed AND they matched! And they were very cheap. $20 a pop and in perfect condition.

To complete the symmetry of matching frames and matching side tables, I embarked on the hunt for the perfect set of hobnail lamps to sit on the tables and accent the white hues in the portraits and bedspread.

I scoured marketplace. I scoured six Saturdays' worth of estate sales. I combed through every thrift shop and antique store within 80 miles. No good. I know these things take time and there are plenty of things I don’t mind waiting for, but I got all kinds of obsessed with finding these lamps!

Finally, I resorted to the key player I haven’t listed yet because it borderlines Phase Three.

I went to the internet.

EBay, Etsy, and Mercari are online thrift stores that are trustworthy enough, but with plenty of downsides.

Part of the fun for Phase Two is that you get instant gratification. You find the treasure, you consider the treasure, you plunder for the treasure and then you carefully take it off its shelf and transport it home in loving, safe arms.

With the internet, you often have to have a lot more patience. You may have to wait for communication from the seller, especially if you’re trying to negotiate. You run into some major Fear of Missing Out (FOMO) because if you’re opening that can of worms, you don’t just have one or two choices like with all the other key players. The internet opened up a newly unlimited sea of options that can be downright overwhelming and stressful.

On the Facebook marketplace, you’re dealing with local people whose eye’s you can look into in person while accessing the item. On the internet, you have no idea who you’re dealing with, how to negotiate best, or what their motives are.

Then you have to pay for AND wait for shipping. Sigh.

All that to say, I avoid buying secondhand things online. But it is an option I resort to when obsession sets in.

Such is the case with these lamps. I spent an exorbitant amount of time searching for what I had pictured and found a dozen good choices. The ones I wanted weren’t cheap and it was going to cost over $100 to ship. They are glass after all so I didn’t want to risk it. I settled for a modest set that is still very cute and considerably more affordable. They aren’t hobnailed proper, but they’re close and suit the space perfectly.

I haven’t thrifted anything for the bathroom yet, but I am on the hunt for some unique artwork. It’s a small room so I’m hoping to stumble upon something unique to hang in there. It’s not bothering me to have it blank for now, so in this case, I will happily wait as long as needed to find what I’m looking for.

That concludes Phase Two for the first floor. As I mentioned in my last post, we aren’t doing much with the other floors yet because we don’t need the space just yet and we’re very comfortable on the main floor. I did however purchase a few things for Alex’s temporary office upstairs.

Eventually, it will probably be a kid’s bedroom, but for now, it’s going to be Alex’s makeshift study. I hit it with a fresh neutral coat of paint and went on a hunt for a 50’s style executive rolltop desk and leather chair.

Both were found with a little patience on Facebook marketplace. I drove over an hour to get the desk with my hatchback Subaru. It was cheap so I had expected to happily make two trips to get the whole thing, but after about 20 minutes of grunting and rearranging with the owner outside her garage, we somehow managed to get the entire desk in the back of my car. I had to use a bungee cord to get her shut, but by George we made it! The next day I got the leather chair from the back of an auto parts office.

Both the desk and the chair were a little dusty and depressed, but after a little restore-refinish for the wood and a little leather conditioner for the chair, both were classed up and ready for conducting very super serious executive business!

You may have noticed from the geography book collection that Alex has a true love of maps, so I’ve also been collecting various maps in my search. My favorite was a $5 roll-down map of Oregon that is nearly as tall as I am.

There you have it!

Phase Two is completed.

In my next post, I’ll tell the story of The Girls and then we will move into Phase Three!