I Think I'm Funny: A Blog Diptych

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.

Shiny Room Things

I now have the greatest dining room in the greatest condo ever. Except it's empty and I want a different light fixture.

The ceiling is now gold (though you can see all the paint strokes...I've been looking around online and this seems a common problem with the Benjamin Moore Studio Finishes Metallics line. Ridiculous at over $25 a quart. I wonder if a sponge or other decorative finish would make it look less strokey). The room is pure drama and I've been dreaming about crystal chandeliers from the start. The store that had my gold paint (they were very nice at JC Licht...I should go back and ask them about the streaks) was near Antique Resources.

If I ever slip into a semi-permanent vegetative state, just park me inside Antique Resources. Hundreds of absolutely gorgeous crystal and bronze hand-carved antique works of art line the ceiling in a gallery of sparkly heaven. $13,800 will get you this 1900s empire style Dore bronze and crystal amazingness that's bigger than I am. You can't quite tell in the photo, but those are lions heads carved in the bronze.
Smaller and less expensive chandeliers are there, too, dipping down into my "under $500 so maybe I can long-term think about it" range, but I really want to wander into an estate sale or find an ad on Craigslist with something completely perfect and dirt cheap.

I've been playing around in Photoshop, trying out various chandeliers in the room. Yes, this is the best use of my time when I still have to pack.

Here's my dining room with the current light fixture:

and with a $1900 empire bronze and beaded crystal chandelier from Antique Resources:

It's waaay over my budget and not even right for the room, but you get the idea.

Then I started on window treatments. I'll talk about this more later I'm sure (long enough post already) but those kind of need to get priority over changing my chandelier. What I wanted in my head turns out to be Austrian or London fabric shades. So some more half-assed Photoshopping with not-quite-the-right-thing and voila!


If you're feeling creative, feel free to decorate my dining room. I even changed to creative commons licensing on my Flickr photo to allow for derivative works, so derive and conquer! Make it beautiful! Find even better chandeliers and the perfect fabric for the shades and the magical ability for me to sew said shades!

Show off your interior decorating talents! I'll post them in a later blog entry, and if I actually steal your idea I'll give you a permanent ad on my blog! Yay incentive!