When I was still a student, my boyfriend graduated college and took a job as a teacher. His work was going to take him hundreds of miles from home, so he needed to furnish his first apartment. He had little money to spare, and most of his furniture was handed down from his parents. I wanted him to take a little memento of our time together, and on a student's budget, I knew I would have to get creative.
I went to the discount store and bought two white plastic parsons tables. I took ticket stubs, photographs, and brochures from outings we took together and artfully arranged them on the top and legs of each table. I held everything in place by covering the surfaces with clear adhesive-backed plastic. When I was done, I presented him with a pair of end tables for his new home, a scrapbook of our time spent together.
The first end tables in my student apartments came from other people's homes. They came from my roommates, my cousin who lived the next town over, and even from the curb-other people's castoffs that I rescued. Yes, maybe they had peeling finish and cracks across the top, but end tables were end tables. I didn't even think of their shabby appearance and mismatched look. I had furniture.
When I got married, I knew it was time to buy "real" furniture. We picked up a sofa that I had been eyeing in the mall, but found it marked down at the furniture discount center. My husband suggested we visit the unfinished furniture store to look at end tables. He was spot on-I saw beautiful a pair of pine Shaker-style tables for $30 each. We stained them a rich mahogany and topped them with coats of satin polyurethane. You could barely tell that we didn't buy them from one of those upscale furniture stores on the other side of town.
When we divorced, he got custody of the furniture. But I was ready for everything new. I had a better-paying job, and I splurged on a set of new living room tables: a square coffee table in rosewood with a fine, nearly-black grain, and a pair of coordinating end tables, one square and the other rectangle. Most rooms are not designed in perfect balance, and I thought that these mismatched end tables showed insight on the part of the furniture designers. And they were gorgeous.
Wherever we moved, the rosewood tables helped make my living room an elegant place to greet visitors and to enjoy a little quiet time. In the Queen Anne Victorian we restored, I had an awkward living room that forced me to remove the rosewood coffee table, but the end tables always had a home.
Later on, I needed to add furniture for a new family room, and a matching set of end tables just wouldn't work. Instead, I found a floor lamp with a hammered copper shade that was integrated into a tiny iron tabletop, just big enough to hold a mug of tea. On the other side of the sectional, I found a perfect solution. The table has a wide top, big enough to hold a lamp and a wooden box that I fill with paperback books. The base of the table is a real workhorse. It is modeled after an apothecary cabinet, and it holds eight small drawers. They hide coasters, boxes of tissues, DVDs and CDs, laptop cords and remote controls.
Yes, our furniture works for us, but we can also let it tell the story of our lives.
Thanks To : Candle Lanterns
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