Furniture Rescue: Yes or No?
By Christa Terry
I’ll admit it… no, I’ll proclaim it! Quite a bit of the furniture and decor in my house came from secondhand sources. Sometimes that has meant sweet hand-me-downs from well-off relatives, and sometimes it has meant finding the perfect thing along the side of the road. How much I do to this inherited and rescued furniture depends on how much TLC it needs. Painting furniture is a favorite rejuvenation technique of mine — especially when it comes to accents that aren’t usually painted.
I’m wondering, however, if I’m, a homeowner at 29, the exception or the rule. Are you enthusiastic about DIY furniture rescue or do you look askance at the people you see gleefully dragging dressers into the back of their minivans on garbage day? What is your opinion of the usual quality of DIY results? When you answer, hit the poll first, then explain yourself in the comments!
February 20th, 2009 at 1:26 pm
My DIY results are fabulous! I found a dresser on the side of the road, stripped it and repainted it. It looks great. I bought a nasty dresser at a junk shop, stripped and refinished it, and put new hardware on it. The wood was great and the carpentry was excellent.
I found an end table for $5 at Salvation Army. It had nasty yellow, gloppy paint on it, but when I scratched the paint, I could see the wood underneath was good. The drawer was dovetailed, so I knew the carpentry was decent.
I stripped and refinished and voila: look at the second picture
http://class-factotum.blogspot.com/2009/02/tuesday-report.html
You just have to put the time and care into it. But I’d much rather rescue something than buy new.
February 22nd, 2009 at 12:01 pm
Wow, nice! I really wish I had more time nowadays to refinish furniture because when I was doing it, I really did enjoy it.
February 23rd, 2009 at 2:51 pm
I live in an apartment building and the dumpster is in the basement. People often leave furniture by the dumpster when they get something new, or when they move out. We’ve rescued a t.v. table, bookshelf, and some picture frames (and a golf bag, which is not furniture but was a good find!).
Unfortunately, since I don’t have a yard, garage, or even a balcony, I am severely limited in what I can do to rehabilitate furniture (basically, nothing that can’t be done in the middle of the living room on the 1940s parquet floor), so I can only take things that are in pretty good condition.
March 15th, 2009 at 9:45 pm
I was a homeowner at 24 and yes, secondhand furniture and what I got out of elderly relatives’ houses was how I made it livable. I still have mostly hand me downs (or as I prefer to call them, heirlooms) in my house, barring mattresses, linens and large appliances. The bookcases and dressers have been repainted so many times…