Hey Steemit!
So I had mentioned in an earlier post that I intended to shake things up a bit, and I do! I wish I was the type of person that was just really good at one thing, but unfortunately that isn't the case. I am just averagely capable of many different things!
About 5 years ago, I was left alone with just my 9 month old and myself. I had quit my job to stay at home and I needed to make an income somehow. There wasn't much that I could do from home, but my mom had a small booth in an antique store and asked if I wanted to join it. So I said sure! That being said, I didn't really have anything to put in it, so I remembered something that my grandfather used to do, which was....dumpster diving! Of course this doesn't mean that I strapped on my trainers and literally ran and jumped into dumpsters, but merely got a schedule of our city for when bulk trash came to different neighborhoods, and drove around to see what people had left out in front of their house.
In doing this, I was able to stay afloat with my finances for nearly 6 months by finding furniture, restoring it and reselling it, until I found a more stable job!
It was a very lucrative thing to do back in 2012, but since, has become swamped with people who all want to be the next Joanna Gaines! Haha. HGTV has never been so popular as it has been these last couple of years! It is a blessing and a curse for those in furniture resale!
(image source: thoughtco)
That being said, I got out of the furniture game a while ago, but man do I miss the thrill of finding something valuable that someone else was planning to throw away. Most of the time this happens because people don't have the time or capacity to take a large piece of furniture to the Goodwill. That and the Goodwill won't do a pickup unless you have a whole houseful of stuff to give away. This unfortunate circumstance is a win-win for people like me! (Or was anyway until I stopped!)
(Literally my storage area after DD sometimes 🤷)
The other rewarding thing about what I did was knowing that I was saving literally tons of furniture from being tossed into the landfill. With my refurbishing and hard work, I could make a buck, someone else could get a really nice piece of furniture, and one less tree had to die to make a desk! (Also, the quality of old furniture is FAR superior to that of newer, chipboard IKEA-type shit. (No offense my Scandinavian friends, but seriously, your furniture sucks.)
(Seriously Doh.)
So, I thought today I would share with you a few of my finds, and if anyone was interested in seeing more of this, I was thinking it would be fun to make a weekly video or so of my dumpster diving adventures, and also how to then go on to restore/refinish the furniture!
This was one of the first pieces I ever found. It was a solid oak dresser, and while scuffed on the front drawers, it was super sturdy and quite nice. (Just so you know, I only own a little SUV and I brought all of this furniture home with me somehow. Let's just say the antenna on my car may or may not be there anymore, and the paint job on the car top may or may not be totally scraped away 🤷) Well, plain wood does not seem to sell well nowadays, and certainly not back in 2012. They were all about the chalkboard paint. Chalkboard paint was expensive though, so I learned how to make my own, and I transformed that solid oak dresser into this cream and black painted one!
(I also sprayed the hardware with 1 can of dollar spray paint from the Home Depot! Heck Yeah!)
So all in all, I spent about $5 in paint and I found this puppy at the side of the road! I ended up selling it for 100 Smackeroos! Capitalism at its finest ladies and gentlemen! 👏👏👏
Moving on.
This next piece I also found sadly dumped outside of someone's house:
This ottoman had a broken leg and the leather on it was ripping. Being a seamstress, I had a large piece of canvas material laying around, and I thought that might look good on it! So, I painstakingly removed each furniture brad, and decided to give it a steampunk makeover. (Remember we are in 2012 right now in this pic, haha). I took my trusty power drill, and fixed the leg, and BAM, a steampunk ottoman makeover:
(This puppy sold for 80 bucks for about 4 hours worth of work. Not too shabby for a SAHM.)
The next few pieces were kind of a random assortment of things. At the time, Pinterest was just coming into its own and people were posting all this amazing stuff they were doing with furniture, so even if I didn't find a whole piece of something, I picked up bits and pieces of things too. This could include but not be limited to: fence posts, drawers, wood pieces, metal pieces, basically anything that could be made into something else.
(This little guy was a piece of wood fencing that I bolted a drawer to, and then added table legs to that drawer to turn it into a garden planter box. I kept it for a long time because it was so cute, but ended up selling it for about $100. I literally only spent about $2 worth of paint on it! Oooo another pro tip: if you don't need a specific color, always check Home Depot for oops paint! It's only anywhere from 2-8 bucks and it goes a LONG way!)
(This was just an old ladder I found and added pots to, which I also found. I sold it for $25!)
(This was a table without a top, so I stapled chicken wire to it and made a flexible potting bench out of it. The pots on top I borrowed from the last image just to show what they would look like. I sold this for $25 as well. and I had found the chicken wire from a different DD!)
(This is one of my favorite pieces. It was a dresser that had an opening top, and it was SO cool! The hardware was a bit damaged, so I had some fixing to do, but I used paint I already had and ended up making $150 on this! It was hard to let go of though! Actually a lot of my pieces were. When you put a lot of time and love into something, you get kind of attached to it! That probably sounds dumb, but it's true!) I never took a before pic of this, so ya get what ya get, sorry!)
Last but certainly not least was this little beauty. It was a Lane cedar chest I found, and the cushion part was all torn up, and the wood part needed to be sanded, but again I had a piece of material that fit it perfectly, and cream paint to cover it with after sanding. This is how it turned out:
(It was worth nearly $250 but I sold it to a close friend for $50 because she had been looking for one!)
I had hundreds of other projects I worked on over the next couple of years, but I didn't take pics of most of them because they went right in to our little booth in the antique store! It was a lot of work, but it was also very rewarding, and super fun to see people pleased with the product I had restored!
Well, if you got through this, maybe you will get a hankering to go out in your community and save something from the throes of the great trash heap! Here's hopin'!