Scoring Unexpected Surprises!
Have I mentioned how much I LOVE Facebook Marketplace? ❤️❤️ Even more so when it yields unexpected surprises! ❤️❤️ Now let me be clear, I have an overall love/hate relationship with Facebook because I loathe how it has turned privacy and personal information into a commodity for sale. I get that this is how their business model works, but let’s just say it can be downright creepy how it knows you were on that guilty pleasure website and then endlessly feeds you ads for their product for the next two weeks. But this isn’t about my relationship with Facebook, it’s about the BARGAINS and SCORES!
Facebook Marketplace can be cumbersome and not very user friendly, but it can also yield scores that I have never found on Craigslist. Remember that dresser I bought to use as our vanity for the future (and currently on hold) master bathroom? It was a bargain at $100!
What about the 1870s era marble fireplace mantel scored weeks later! This would easily sell in a salvage store for $1,500 and I found it listed for $50!!! We only had three twenty dollar bills and I felt so guilty stealing it from him for such a good price, I gave him all three twenty’s and told him to keep it all.
So with a maximum budget of $100, I turned to Facebook Marketplace last month in search of a drafting table for my studio. I was not disappointed! The first one I found was $60 and quite nice. Unfortunately, I was too late as the seller had already sold it to somebody else for next day pick up. Then I came across this listing with not just a drafting table but also a vintage lamp, some drafting equipment, and storage drawers for exactly $100.
We arranged for a socially distanced pickup the next morning. I let the guy know I was on my way and he put the table and related stuff out in his driveway for us to load into our car. With our masks on, I looked the table over as well as the box full of all of the other things. I then got super excited because I realized I was getting way more than just a drafting table. I handed him a ziplock bag with five twenty’s in it (this was the closest we got to each other) and Yoav and I began to load the car.
I knew I got a lot of stuff for a hundred bucks, but it wasn’t until I got home and brought the stuff into the house that I realized just what a good deal it was. So I got the drafting table I wanted, but the excitement was confirmed when I discovered that the awesome vintage light is a vintage Dazor Drafting Table Lamp which routinely lists on eBay for $75 or more, and then there are the two wooden storage units. The small one is adorable and was filled with pens and pencils. But the larger three drawer unit was in my opinion the real unexpected surprise.
Commercial Break:
Did you know I co-host the True Tales From Old Houses podcast with Stacy Grinsfelder of Blake Hill House? Each episode covers old house topics, interviews with interesting guests, and more! We are wrapping up Season 3 soon and preparing for an exciting Season 4! Go have a listen!
As I began to look through the drawers, I found them to be full of various drafting supplies, Rapidograph pens, drafting templates, many tubes of pencil lead, and other related yet random things. And then there was the 10k gold Cross Pencil which is easily worth $50 on eBay. I have already gotten far more than I paid for in value.
All these things are great, but it was the adorable three drawer storage unit that I fell in love with. It has clearly been through a lot of use over the years, and there are plenty of marks, scratches, and nicks to give it a patina you cannot easily recreate. I decided I didn’t want to strip it and refinish because I liked that it had all these blemishes. So I did the next best thing… I revived it with Howard Restor-A-Finish.
The intent was not to make it glossy and shiny, but to bring it back to life while retaining all of its battle scars. I cleaned it up, removed the old labels, and used Howard Restor-A-Finish to revive it. Then I cut new labels and added drawer liners in my favorite color (shocker!).
I love how it came out and I am excited to put it to use in the studio when I get it finished… About the studio…. It’s still a work in progress… A very slow work in progress… A very very slow work in progress. I have the paint and I have begun to prep the walls and floors, but as things go with an old house, it is a bigger project than I had hoped it would be.
I am looking into hiring out some plaster repair for another area in the house and debating whether to include the front corner of the studio which suffered water damage and poor repairs from the past. I have also realized the floor is a bigger challenge than I expected, but I think I have a solution… More on that next time. In the meantime, I again want to acknowledge how awesome Facebook Marketplace is… If you are willing to look through a lot of crap to find the gems.
Oh… One more thing… I plan to apply Howard Restor-A-Finish to the smaller box and will post pics when it’s done.
Did you enjoy this post? Yay! Want to know when new ones come out? It’s super easy… Just scroll to the very bottom of the page, add your email address in the little box on the left and click subscribe! I promise I will never share your email, sell, or spam you in any way. You will always have the option to unsubscribe at any time.
15 Comments
Leave a Reply
This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.
The pie’ce de re’sistance are the labels…..too clever and so appropriate❣️
Glad to see you doing well.
Thanks for the well wishes Helen. 😊😊 I am indeed getting better and it feels great.
The labels…. I wasn’t sure how I will use this yet, but I figured that the labels will work for pretty much anything. 😂😂
Wow, you really did score! The Vyco board cover is yet another bonus. I agree with Helen that your labels are the best part… literally LOL! Congratulations on your new studio additions!
🤪😜 I didn’t really know what Vyco board cover was when I picked it up, but then I remembered my drafting table in high school being covered in it. Glad you like the labels, as I responded to Helen, I have no idea how I am going to use the drawers yet… But I have no doubt I will find a good use for them.
Love it and truly a bargain!!
Thank you Beth 😊😊
What wonderful bargains! I love when I find things like that too.
Thanks Karen 😊
Facebook Marketplace for the WIN! 😂😂
[…] Devyn’s Restor-A-Finish project […]
I love the finds, but the marble mantle – whoa, that is a great deal!
😂😂😂
I discovered the marble mantel on Facebook Marketplace during my chemo and radiation treatments, and I was weak… BUT… I could not let that one go. The guy just wanted it out of his garage, and I happened to be the lucky person who contacted him first. He knew it was worth a fortune, but was glad that it went to somebody who will use it. I almost wanted to offer him even more $$ out of guilt. 🤪🤪
I plan to eventually install it in our dining room creating a fireplace where there was once none (although there was one directly above where I am going to put it).
With your place, I cannot imagine that their was not a fireplace there originally. Fireplaces would have been the primary source of heat originally, right? I bet it was taken out at some point to get the additional square footage, or simply as styles changed and heat was plumbed in. So, just putting an original feature back (I bet. . .).
An interesting thing about our house… Even though the house was built for a comfortably middle class family in 1852, it didn’t have a dining room. 😳😳
Dining rooms up to this period had pretty much always been the luxury of the wealthy and were only beginning to come into popularity for the middle classes. There are houses in our neighborhood built within a few years of our which do have a dining room, but ours never did. A decade later, they were standard in all but the smallest of new houses.
Based on the woodwork and window configuration, my best guess as to when our dining room came into existence indicates it was completed in the 1880s by Daniel W Farroe, who lived here from 1881 through 1897. He did many modernizations to the house adding gas lighting, additional plumbing, as well as several Victorian updates such as our mantel and the very Victorian tile in the vestibule.
Daniel took the original kitchen (which was quite large at 11×24) and divided it into two spaces. This resulted in a kitchen that is now 11×8, and a dining room which is 11×15. It is likely that because this was the period that gas lighting came into the house, it also converted from a coal burning stove to a gas stove in the now much smaller kitchen. In the new dining room, he removed the two original double hung windows and replaced with a bank of four windows higher up on the wall. It is also very likely that these windows (which look directly into our neighbors house) were leaded glass because that was all the rage at the time and they would offer light with privacy. You can see how it looked when we bought the house in the original listing photos gallery
So, that is the long story of why there never was a fireplace in the dining room. It was likely more elegant than it is now with its popcorn ceiling and the bank of windows replaced with cheap aluminum ones in the 80s (which need replacing, but that’s a whole other can of worms).
Long term plans include gutting and rebuilding the entire space. There isn’t really anything special beyond that fact that it has 12″ tall baseboards. The windows no longer have any moldings, and the two doors are mismatched. We will be enlarging the kitchen to 11×10 and shaking the dining room to 11×13, still ample enough. I also plan to return the windows back to their original configuration, and shift the back door from the side yard to the rear yard… But that is still a few years away… In the meantime, our dining room mostly serves as storage space and staging for the other spaces. In the short term, I hope to do a lipstick on a pig temporary fix up until budget allows for the major renovation.
I surely enjoy following your home restoration tons! I really have to go back and read everything from the beginning. Where did you find out all of the history of the house ?I would love to research the home in Fishtown / Richmond that I grew up in,plus the two older homes that I had purchased when raising my Family in the same area.
Blessings to you both this lovely weekend.I thrive on historical homes and seeing how people restore them rather than gut them out and modernize.Although my present and last home is an expanded 1950 Cape Cod…It is decorated Colonial…..I have been told it looks like an English Cottage inside and out .🌷
Thank you 🙏 😊
Researching the history of the house has been an ongoing labor of love… I have probably spent 80+ hours on it over the past three years. I wrote a post about learning the actual age of our house last summer (and I have yet to finish part II about the style of our house, but I will, I will… 😂)
You can find out a lot about older Philly houses from PhilaGeoHistory.org. But it takes some digging…. Also, know that shortly after consolidation in the mid 1850’s, the city renumbered all of the addresses city wide, and the city did a massive street renaming project in the mid 1890’s I had to back into my info, but it was worth it. And, once I found out about the original owner, Englebert Ovenshine, I googled his name and discovered the entire family and that his son Samuel was a famous Brigadier General in the US Army with his own Wikipedia page.
I love the English Cottage look! Mid-century Cape Cod’s are timeless! I believe the 1950’s to be the last decade when quality was a priority in new house construction. It went downhill from there 🤪