Like I mentioned in my last post, we furnished almost our entire house with second-hand furniture. The only reason all the furniture in our house wasn’t second-hand was because my husband has a penchant for carpentry. That guy loves himself a wood shop. And, he was ecstatic to finally have one (we’ve been sharing shop-less houses with other grad students or living in apartments for awhile…) by utilizing the barn on our property as such. So, when we needed a bookshelf, he couldn’t resist. When we tired of living like twenty-somethings with our new mattress on the floor, he built us a bed frame out of reclaimed wood.
Speaking of that mattress, it is the only item of furniture in our house that is neither second-hand nor handmade (handmaking a mattress, yikes!). We left the mattress of my childhood (yes, I confirmed with my mother that I had the same mattress from the time I was around two years old until I was 34 – my husband couldn’t get over picturing my two-year-old self dwarfed in a full-sized mattress) in North Carolina, as we were unwilling to ship that well-used beauty to Hawai`i, and then scored a furnished apartment while living in Hawai`i. So, for the first time in my life, when my husband and I moved to California, I purchased a mattress. Although I would have been happy to accept a hand-me-down mattress from a friend or relative, I draw the line at obtaining a mattress from an unknown source.
Ah, but back to the wood-working and creations of human hands. I find things that come from the labors of a human hand working their form to have a tangible depth, and this deepens further when those hands belong to someone I know. That we would all think of a person whenever we looked at our furniture.
Our handmade bookshelf and bed frame in all their glory: