Sometimes it takes a few years ….

When a person is collecting things, there’s usually not a whole lot of patience that goes along with it, especially when that person gets a bug in his/her head to go get something NOW.  It was that way with my cracked ice table.  I had a small bit of patience, because I really wanted a vintage set, but after looking for a couple years and finding nothing that was affordable or in good enough condition to put in my kitchen, I turned to creating a new one.  The downside is that I have a knockoff of the cracked ice laminate that isn’t a pearly and vivid as the original.  But it looks nice, and it’s different, and all the dings and scratches are from me and my kids.

I’ve been searching for some chevron cabinet pulls for some time. Having only run into them in small batches on eBay, Etsy, or in antique stores, I found that they’re usually way overpriced and hard to locate.  So imagine my surprise when I saw on a local garage sale group on Facebook that there were 16 of these babies available for a decent price.

 

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Happy Mother’s Day to me with this find!

Not sure where I’m going to put them yet, as I have far more than 16 cabinet pulls to replace in my kitchen.  For now I am going to hold onto them, having faith that I will eventually find the perfect place to put these.

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The good, bad, and ugly of 1955 decorating ideas

The American Home magazine collection from 1955 has been a hoot so far. First there was the bad soup collection, then the green ruin they actually presented as a good idea, and now I have a smattering of miscellany that I’ve found in the bound collection. Not everything presented in the magazine is a bad idea. There are some pictures of kitchens that make me yearn with desire — a sort of “wow-I-love-that-kitchen-and-would-do-just-about-anything-to-have-one-like-it-today” sort of desire.
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A question of cabinet hardware …

The cabinet hardware we currently have has always struck me as ugly. It almost looked like something that came from a 70s or 80s obsession with everything cowboy.

I tried to imagine how they would look once the kitchen was redone, for we will be having kind of a black and white theme going on, and these cabinets (original to the house) will be painted white. Sure, I’d love to get new cabinets. But, ah, there’s a little bit of a price issue there.

So the other day I was browsing through my new bible — a 1957 Sears catalog that I snagged off eBay, and lo and behold, I find this:

Turns out that the ugly arrows are original to the house. Argh! How I wanted to get rid of them and replace them with chrome, but now I’m rethinking it. (Just for the record, we do NOT have the hinges with the straps. Thank god for that; it would be entirely too much.) No surprise, these are “Early American” style — back when people weren’t sure whether to decorate with a modern flair or cling to the days of yore, so they tended to do a little bit of both.

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