More furniture hunting (and reverse garbage)

The never ending acquisition of old, cheap or free furniture continues.

There's a shop run by a very kind man with acute hearing deficiency on the corner of Addison and Illawarra in the Sydney suburb of Marrickville. His shop is a plain cement room and only opens on weekends but the prices are fair and the stuff speaks to me more often than not. I bought from him a bedside table ($10), a bookshelf ($30), a rug ($10) and a small ceramic bathtub (decorative, $5).

What I liked about this table is: 1. It has a drawer for stuff you want to hide AND a shelf for stuff you want to display, 2. The legs are not entirely straight all the way down which makes it more interesting, 3. The hardware is original and pretty.

Of course I wouldn't be blogging about it if I hadn't changed something :-) so I spray painted it red! It has these beautiful cracks on the top which the paint didn't quite fill and they give the table  great look!

I think it fits much better with my personality now, I'm into colorful stuff lately...

By the way, that lamp is from this insane place also in Marrickville and very near the same shop called Reverse Garbage. The price of the lamp was 3 dollars but then I had to spend another 13 replacing the lamp socket which was cracked. The original lamp shade was a plain (and dirty) white, so I followed this *amazing* tutorial on how to cover a lamp shade with fabric.

Let me tell you some more about Reverse Garbage. There is where the items that are garbage but not really garbage go to die. Things like plaster, art, furniture, boxes, glass bottles, costumes, paint, chemicals, ceramics, etc, and they are all for sale! It is a crazy place! Words cannot begin to describe it so please let me take you on a photo tour:

When you see this incredible sculpture, you have arrived at the right place.

Theatre costumes?

Wigs, shoes and piles of ridiculous clothes.

Metal drums, ceramics...

Doors...

Pink styrofoam bags!

If you are throwing an Oscars viewing party, you'll really need these, however overpriced.

Mannequins, posters, art frames.

You name it...

If you are in the Inner West or Marrickville area, do go check out these places, it'll be worth the visit!

1960's chest revisited

Remember my Italian treasure chest?

Pretty much everyone agreed that the old paper inside had to go, and go it did!

It took me a while, and it is FAR from perfect, in fact it was really awkward to cut and glue at times, and for some parts I ended up using many pieces of paper to cover a single area... I didn't want to do a DIY on this precisely because I sucked at it so much, I'm the one who needs a DIY!

One thing I can say is that it smelled... well... like it was 50 years old. You know that old musty grandparent house smell? Yeah, well it took about 6 sprays of Febreze (the Aussie version anyway, it's called Oust) to get rid of it, always letting it dry completely between sprays.

Hope you like it.

Have a nice weekend!!!

1960's chest

I hit the jackpot today.

Mitchell Road Auction House is a warehouse full of beautiful junk. In the ground floor are items that have gone through some mild to serious tear and wear, but are still functional and/or beautiful in their own way. The items on this floor are very fairly priced and this is where we bought chairs for our kitchen table and a standing mirror last Saturday. We paid $AUD 116.50 for a set of 4 chairs and the mirror, all in good condition. The auction house adds 16.5% to the tag price for having found and stored the item in their store. That is why we paid that odd number.

The second floor of the building is full of gorgeous antiques and retro items that are in *excellent* condition, and I mean there is a lot of stuff that is 30 years old but looks as good as new. The items on this floor are significantly more expensive, but you could debate that they are also fairly priced due to the fact that they have been maintained so well.

In any case, I liked the place a lot and decided to pay another visit today just for kicks. Well my friends, I did not come home empty handed.

I found this GORGEOUS chest!!! I knew I wanted it the second I saw it. The price tag was AUD$65 and then I just had to have it! M and I had been talking about how it would be nice to find a coffee table item that could also serve as storage, so we thought a chest would be perfect. Since that discussion a couple of months ago, we have seen a few beautiful chests but they were $600+ and then some were $100 or so, but too simple and boring. I took a chance when buying this one today because M is not home, he went on a company retreat for the weekend. Man I hope he likes it as much as I do.

The chest still has stickers attached to it from its voyage. I find it so fascinating, it makes me giddy.

What I could gather from the stickers is that it came from Italy on the ship Galileo Galilei operated by the company Lloyd Triestino and it belonged to either a Mr. Iannello Rosario, or a Mrs. Rosario Iannello. Even the original lock is still attached and says "made in Italy", though you can open the chest because someone broke the lock mechanism.

So I googled "SS Galileo Galilei" and finding out about it was easier than I thought. This ship travelled between Genoa, Italy and Sydney, Australia, between the early 60's and the late 70's after which the ship changed name and operator several times.

I am so delighted with this chest! I paid 75 bucks for it but to me it is worth its weight in gold. I think I will visit the Mitchell Road Auction Centre as part of my Saturday routines from now on.

The insides of the chest are clearly worn out, and now I am trying to decide whether I should scrape off the old paper and attach my own new one, or if I should let it be as it is and try to preserve it. What do you guys think? 

DIY desk renovation

For the few of you (sad) who were puzzled about my last post. It's all good now, I took a chill pill and I feel great, in fact I have had a pretty darn nice couple of days since then. So as promised, my first DIY project.

Supplies for this project include: a desk, paint, knobs, glue and pretty paper.

We purchased this beauty from the Salvation Army in Tempe:

$50 bucks, and overpriced trust me (oh, and they were asking for $85). Perhaps they charged me for all those dead bugs I found inside and I'm not joking. The first step to renovation is cleaning the piece, this when I found spider webs and dead flies encrusted on the insides.

The next step to renovation is going to the hardware store and buying the supplies you will need. I needed new hardware (knobs) and paint. I went for white satin spray paint. I went for spray paint because I wanted to avoid having brush streaks all over my desk, I wanted it to look evenly painted, which it does, but I also learned that spray painting is wasteful and inefficient and dirty. Lots of those paint particles that don't end up on the piece will end up on yourself or on the surfaces around the spraying area. I think next time I will simply invest into a good brush/sponge and use the good ol' bucket of paint.

I had to do 3 coats of paint (about 2.5 cans, good news is spray paint dries fast!) to convert this desk from black to white. I chose white "satin" because it was the in-between medium between glossy and matte.

I let the desk dry for 24 hours before I did anything else to it, and I also sprayed the inside of the drawer with a single thin coat because I wanted a white surface for the next step.

Not too far from the hardware store, there is also an arts and crafts store. I found the most *beautiful* hand made Japanese paper there. The sad part is that it costs $24 per sheet :((( so Instead I went for a pretty floral pattern for $8 per sheet.

I measured my desk drawer and cut the paper to size. I also cut off the corners because sometimes you have to cut corners when the paper doesn't fit into them...

Apply regular white craft glue generously... not. I learned from this that when it comes to glue, less is more. If the paper gets soaked in glue then it will develop little wrinkles and even stains (happened to a different project). So just apply a little bit of glue and spread it around with a brush or bundle of paper.  Spread it all the way to the edges, and if more is needed then apply a little bit more. I worked with halves of my surface instead of all of it at once.

Let dry. Install hardware and voila!

I have pretty new desk and I really, really like how it turned out. I bought that little stool for it and I want to make a little cushion so it is more comfortable to sit. I have no plans on how I will do that yet.