Balls and Walnuts
more than you ever wanted to know
Quest for furniture
My son doesn’t understand why I keep spending money on a room which he claims will never get used. He’s not entirely right; I would argue that the room’s usefulness is already evident. My books are out of their boxes, the boxes are out of the garage, and that wasn’t gonna happen without bookshelves.
The $599 sofa bed that wouldn’t fit through the doorway? I have to admit, that was a mistake. “Why would you buy something like that without measuring the doorway?” he asked yesterday. “Sheer stupidity,” I said. It never occurred to me someone would build a sofa bed that wouldn’t fit through a bedroom door. Or that someone would build such a narrow door in the first place.
First place I checked out yesterday showcased rustic Spanish pieces built from reclaimed wood. (It’s here, the Capri, catalog #228 if you’re curious.) $350. The table rests on sturdy legs, looks the sort that with a glass top, could be a prime surface for Mexican drug lords to cut lines of coke from their personal stash; looks the sort that would soon have dust motes and small pets swinging around it in perfect elliptical orbit.
From their I trekked to various Furniture Outlets and Warehouses and Discount Barns, noting the prices on a variety of sturdy, boring, and cheap pieces, and soon discovering that the best stuff remained hidden in the catalogs. Ultimately I would buy some of that catalog stuff, a three-piece coffee table and two end tables, and a third Japanese-style end table to sit beside the reclining chair:
. . . the sum total of which cost less than the Spanish planetoid. But before arriving at this decision, I had to journey deeper into the city, to a Spanish hacienda place, where they had an interesting carved piece that could only be described as pre-distressed. Do you have one without any of those big splits and chips? No, just that one. $199. And I would have to stain and finish it, and glass the top.
It went downhill from there. The mercury was hitting 107 and the air would suck the joy out of you, but I passed a swap meet and had to turn around. But first I spied a place that claimed to sell antique furniture. I should have been warned by the side-busted, reclaimed-from-someone’s-industrial-dumpster mattress and box springs on the front sidewalk with the $160 price tag, but I went inside anyway. A desperate little man led me around the store, and I looked at a slew of overpriced 1950s kitsch that even my grandparents would have regarded as too old-fashioned.
Back to the swap meet, where my memories of the Berkeley swap meet on Ashby, with its tie-dyed shirts and boxes of LPs, its acres of furniture cleared from the apartments of graduating seniors, its quiet surprises (tiny Erlenmeyer flasks with ground glass stoppers, psychedelic blown-glass bongs) were soon slapped down. This was a swap meet for the Dollar Store crowd. I passed racks of faux Apple Bottoms and Levis, a few hundred feet devoted to various sockets from a thousand socket wrench sets (but no wrenches), cleaning fluids in spray bottles and huge replacement jugs, ancient sun-bleached PS2 game cartridges, fake houseplants whose owner assured passersby were “Cheap, cheap!” The heat was migraine-inducing. The dust would sort itself out of my system over the course of hours as flecked sputum and chestnut-brown boogers. I made it down one row and up another, and then I was out of there. No furniture at the Bako swap meet, sad to say, and if they had, I suspect I’d have been better off driving the streets looking for garage sales.
Time to go to the grocery store . . . Karen needs supplies for today’s tarantula feeding frenzy . . .
D.
I have fantasies of flea market finds, flaking hulks that can be turned into wondrous pieces with the right application of paint or stripper or varnish. But I never see anything in a flea market that would look even halfway decent unless you completely replaced it with a new piece of furniture.
Hence Ikea’s success.
Some of my best antique pieces came from the swap meet at the Rose Bowl. Swap meets seem cheesier these days.
Of course, in order to do anything well you have to do it more than 1 hour every 6 months or so, and so my problems with finding anything good in a flea market have more to do with my own lack of dedication than anything else.
Not to be a classist snob, but . . . well, I guess I am being a classist snob, but I need a more upscale swap meet. Or perhaps a trip to Berkeley.