Tuesday, June 16, 2009

Saturday, June 13, 2009

Chandelier!


I found a chandelier! For $90!

I went to an estate sale on Tuesday with no expectations and there it was, hanging in the garage. They had a bunch of other chandeliers and light fixtures and insane quantities of other crap, but mine was just there, hanging, being exactly what I needed and $90.

It was filthy. I thought a little late of taking "before" and "after" photos while I cleaned it off with a wet paper towel, but here you can see the "before" and "after" with the clean one on the left:


Now I still need to fix it up. It's missing some of its hanging crystals, and they don't seem to be the standard "u drop" ones I'm finding on Ebay. Plus whatever aparatus is required to go from socket to bulb, be it fake candle or something else. I just have no idea about that part. Then getting it wired into my actual ceiling...but considering I've put all of $90 into it so far and had feared/expected to sink at least $400, I totally win. Now I can still afford to slipcover my big armchair (probably in this fabric)!

Also at the fabulous estate sale: art. Tons and tons of art. Framed portraits of John Wayne and oils of houses and trees and things "handpainted in Taiwan" and prints of birds and a million other individual things that made no sense with the rest of it. It would take a person a solid day to look through it all, and I wished I knew more about the values of things. I'm sure a knowledgeable person could make a killing in there; maybe not Antiques Roadshow, but signed? numbered? original? crap? I ended up with three black and white scapes of Roman-looking ruins that clearly went together but were different sizes. There was a group of women (family, perhaps?) digging through the art with me and one of them noticed the scattered set. I modified my mental picture of my dining room walls to include the trio and decided to take them home. Here they are with my $6 Salvation Army and $10 garage sale mirrors:


Things are coming together quite nicely, I think.