My New (Furniture) Baby

A pet peeve of mine with the blogging world is how blog 'businesses' can time their posts. Does that makes sense?

An example would be, a blog is redoing their guest room and they write a blog about how they've painted and they list a few projects they still need to get done, furniture they need to find, etc. They may happen to mention that they are looking for a dresser to fit a specific space and what style they have in mind.

MAGICALLY, a week later, they have an update about said guest bedroom and hark! They found the. perfect. dresser. And they came across it 'randomly' on Craigslist just by searching 'dresser'.

In your mind, you are like wow! That was so quick! They found what they needed at a great price. Awesome! I wish I lived in an area where people posted fabulous stuff all the time! But in reality, they have mapped out both the guest bedroom project (and the items that they were looking for) weeks or months ago but they didn't post about it until later.

This grinds my gears. For over a year or two now, Bryan and I have been using a "long" dresser that my parents bought before my eldest sister Alison was born for our entertainment station. It was flanked by two massive DVD racks that held our ridiculous collection of movies. It was a fine interim set up, even if it was ugly as all get out.

During that entire time, I was searching, yard saling, thrift storing, and stalking every website I could to find a dresser or buffet that would fit our needs. I came up empty every time. I could either pay a sickening amount of money for a real-wood piece, a ridiculous amount of money for a particle board contraption, I could go through the pain and mentally challenging process of trying to build something from scratch, or I could play the almost endless waiting game of finding the 'right' piece at the 'right' price. This last option, the one I chose, was like trying to find a pair to any of my shoes since adopting our new puppy, Sophie.

A few Saturday's ago, my friend Colleen and I were in a neighboring town and we hit up a thrift store we both like. I've been looking for a few items, namely a desk for my office and a entertainment center (with pretty specific measurements) for quite some time, so it was standard operating procedure to peruse a store and leave empty-handed.

Side note: I leave thrift stores empty-handed more than I leave with an item. If you hit up a thrift store or yard sale and you buy something every time at every one? You're doing it wrong, cause no one is that lucky.

Back to the story. We were looking at the furniture and we both saw it at the same time. And I gasped.  It was a long dresser, with three drawers surrounded by two cabinets that had three small drawers inside. It was a solid piece of furniture in great condition. We both stared at it and each other for quite sometime.

Colleen had a measuring tape in her purse (lucky me!) and it fit my dimensions almost perfectly. It was a really nice piece of furniture and it was marked at $80.

I couldn't believe my luck. Bryan was out of town snowboarding, so I snapped a few pictures and we left. I didn't want to buy it without him at least seeing it. When I showed him he looked pretty impressed. I tried to get him to drive back to the thrift store that night so we could buy it but he said he was way too tired to deal with it that evening. The store was closed on Sunday and I worked Monday. I thought for sure we were going to miss out on this nearly perfect piece of furniture for our house.

Then, Colleen said she would go buy it for me on Monday morning and put it on hold so Bryan could pick it up later that day. She wanted to go to Costco so it wasn't too out of her way. I called the store that morning to ask if they could put it on hold for me and they said they could only hold it after it had been sold. So, Colleen was our only hope! After swinging by my work to pick up $100, she left and I waited to hear the news. A while later she called me and said it was still there and she bought it... but when she had walked up to it, she noticed that there was an additional sticker on it. That beautiful, blessed sticker marked down the dresser to HALF PRICE.

I thought she had to be kidding. There is no way I was now the proud owner of a piece of furniture that I had been looking for forever and it was only FORTY DOLLARS.

But it was. And I was. Proof:

Finally, my long and tiring search had paid off. My father-in-law had to go to Visalia that day anyways, so Bryan went with him and they loaded it up and brought my new furniture baby home. Colleen and her husband Jordan came to help us move things around and get it in place. I love it. It holds ALL of our DVDs, with a little room to grow. It's the perfect height and length.

Lets do the before and after:

I know it's hard to see with the vase in the way, but there is the so-called long dresser with the two DVD towers next to it.

And here is a terrible picture of it once we got it into place. The accessories have changed already and it looks better. Maybe I'll try to get a better picture of it right now. 

That's not really a great picture either but it gives you the idea of what I'm going for. I have yet to find suitable lamp shades for my World Market lamps. It's harder than I thought to pick out lamp shades!

Anyways, I got a nice piece of furniture that can easily be updated if I so choose. Right now, I like it how it is, although I probably will replace the knobs. Oh, we took out a drawer to house our cable box, Wii, router and PS3...I'm hoping to reuse the face of the drawer so we have the ability hide them. I'll keep you updated on how that progresses.

Moral of the story; good things do come to those who wait. I was patient and picky but it paid off. Woohoo!