new life for old things, home furnishings edition.

Our landlord came by yesterday with his van full of hand planes and chisels and other things he figured we might need in order to hang the antique door I came into last week. The door ended up being slightly warped and the doorframe turned out to be anything but square, and I was very grateful to have the good natured help of a person who’s hung a few doors in his day. (Thankfully, our landlord also seems to have nearly as big a penchant for old things as I do.) He chiseled and planed and puzzled over door stops and I removed hardware from the door and paint from the hardware and then put everything back together again. Today, there’s a new (old) door up and swinging and a crystal doorknob that turns.

In the spirit of Earth Week, here’s a roundup of posts I’ve written about fixing up and improving something that already exists, especially when it comes to furniture and home goods. Most all of the furniture in our apartment is vintage or secondhand or something that otherwise belonged to someone else before belonging to us. We’ve found some of it on sidewalks and some of it at stoop sales. We’ve sometimes had luck in thrift stores or antique shops and sometimes had better luck on Craigslist or through our neighborhood Buy Nothing Project. Some of these finds didn’t require anything more than a good vacuuming and a wipe down and some of them required a whole lot of imagination and even more elbow grease. In either case, here’s to the deep satisfaction of taking good care.

In case they provide some inspiration or guidance for any of you, here’s more…

On painting our furniture…

And changing a changing table, slowly.

On making my own drawer pulls…

And lining old dresser drawers.

On transforming a sidewalk-find china cabinet into a chifferobe…

And doing nothing at all to a very vintage cupboard.

On reupholstering a couch…

And cleaning upholstery…

And wondering, briefly, what amount of DIY is worth it…

On adding new seats to old dining chairs…

…weaving a new seat for a side chair

And turning a folding chair into the monochromatic chair of my dreams.

On buying nothing new for a new baby…

…welcoming a new-to-us bunk bed…

And rescuing an old school desk.

On settling on shoe storage

And winging it with shoe storage.

On unconventional dining tables and using a cot for a couch.

On fixing old doorknobs.

And just in case you’ve missed it, I wrote a lot about furnishing and decorating a home with secondhand furniture and vintage treasures in my book, Simple Matters.