bound for the curb

Some used furniture I'm leaving at the curb tonight. Read about where everything came from and how I decided to get rid of it all on my professinal organizing blog, here.

abandoned road construction sign score

Okay, so this was possibly illegal (if you consider taking road construction signs that have been left abandoned at the side of the road illegal), but I couldn't resist. Every day on my walk to work I'd been passing by this sign left over from road construction last fall, and I coveted it for my apartment. I was originally thinking of hanging it in my front room, but now I'm favoring the idea of hanging it in the hall opposite my kitchen doorway.

I love this sign on so many levels. The colour (while not, admittedly, blue like everything else in my life) appeals to me. I love graffiti, and while the sign is technically not graffiti, it definitely has that kind of feel. As you can see from later photos below, it's really beat up (although thankfully the wood is not rotting - it was a repurposed from an actual road construction sign (visible on the verso, immediately below), and therefore both made with marine-grade plywood and protected from dampness by the coatings on each face). I won't say any more, except that I find one of these photos really erotic, for some reason.

washbasin veggie bowl

I found this enamelled washbasin in a pile of garbage outside a home that was being renovated in my Toronto neighbourhood. The bowl was filthy, but after I got it home and cleaned it up, I loved its beat-up patina - a perfect container for late summer tomatoes.

replica vintage clock

Okay, technically this clock wasn't a curb surfing find. I lived in a multi-unit apartment building in Toronto a few years ago, and tenants would leave stuff they no longer wanted in the laundry room for other tenants to take. Early one morning when I went down to do laundry, I found this cool replica of a vintage clock.

Unfortunately, after I took it back up to my apartment and cleaned it up, I decided I didn't want to keep it because it was too blue. (I was kind of into monochrome off-white at the time. Kind of still am.) So within a week it made its way back down to the laundry room, to be picked up by somebody else...

good-bye chairs

My name is Michelle Lynne Goodfellow, and I have a chair fetish. Well, probably not. That is - if fetishes have anything to do with sex. Although... never mind.

But anyhow... I have a chair addiction, I guess. I can't stop buying chairs. And recently I've decided I need to get rid of some of my stuff, and the obvious place to start (because I have so many of them) seems to be there.

Above are two cream-coloured kitchen chairs I got from my local Goodwill back in the fall. I love the way they look - they were perfect in my kitchen when I brought them home - but they really aren't in great shape. A male guest sat in one of them for about an hour one night... and he experienced rung fail.

So I decided to put them out on Sunday afternoon (the day before garbage day this week; London's garbage pick-up rotates on a six-day schedule), and before I carried them to the road, I took these pictures. Also decided to get rid of another chair... but more on that in a minute.


I loved the way the late afternoon sunlight diffused as it sifted through the air of my front room.








These chairs had some of my favorite features, including rough undersides and amateur repairs.




I love the brushmarks of paint on the underside of the seat.










Natural patina...






One of my own botched repair jobs - after one of the cats knocked the chair over and broke a rung outright.


Loose joints...




So below is the other chair - one that a Toronto friend of mine found at the side of the road in Riverdale. I loved the bones of this mid-20th century teak chair so much that I took it home, even though the seat was a mess.


I painstakingly pulled up an old upholstery job, and cut away the original caning on the seat. All the upholsterer's tacks gashed my knuckles as I spent hours trying to pull them up too.




Actually, on second thought I think the wood is beech. But what do I know?


In the end I gave up and replaced the seat with some old plywood boards, cut to size. (Not seen here.) If I didn't have a dearth of space, I'd probably keep this chair around just for the beauty of its worn edges...

sunday night curb surfing

This post was originally published on my personal blog on April 26, 2009.

I love curb surfing. Tonight's score was a dining room chair picked up right outside my front door - a match for another chair I'd rescued a few months ago. I think it belonged to the cute guy with the kids who just moved out - the seats on both had been recovered with a disgusting dusty rose fabric that was filthy with children's paint and greasy blotches. But as with the previous chair, when I removed the fabric, the original pleather upholstery was in great condition, and all it needed was a wipe with a damp cloth.

Above is the frame with the seat removed. I have to apologize for the really lame how-to instructions on this project: Basically I just turned the chair upside down on my work table and unscrewed the seat from the frame. But I didn't take a picture of that part. Sorry.

Nor did I take a picture of how disgusting the chair looked before I cleaned it up. Nor did I take a picture of the tools and screws I used to put it back together. Luckily I had a spare wood screw in my toolbox, since this chair was missing one of its seat screws.



The finished, reassembled chair is on the right, beside the aforementioned mate that I rescued during the winter. I love their simple lines, and the black seats and dark wood look really great in my front room. Oh - forgot to mention that I also waxed the chair backs (the part that would touch the back of someone sitting in the chair), because the wood finish had weathered off both, and they looked a bit dodgy.



Today's find in its (temporary?) new home - at one end of my front room. I need to get some felt pads for the chair legs, so that they won't scrape against the floor whenever I lazily slide it around my apartment. Right now it's serving as an ersatz side table for the chair beside it.