I heart furniture consignment stores
Sitting in a hotel room in Montreal on a business trip, which means I have finally have time to write an entry. (Actually, I don't. I just don't want to do any of the stuff I'm supposed be doing.)
This last weekend was a blur of running errands and doing all the typical moving in type stuff around the new house. Evenings last week were dedicated to removing the last of our belongings out of the old house and doing the final clean-up (shampooing carpets, cleaning wood floors, cleaning the bathrooms, kitchens, etc.). Except for my standard Wednesday night sculpt/Zumba classes, neither of us has been to the gym in two weeks. I can feel it in my energy levels, and I hate it.
Good thing we bought a somewhat new house. List of things that need to be done to the new house:
- Get window treatments. There were none in the entire house, and there are 17 windows. We took care of two of them the day we moved in, and another seven over the weekend. Because we are cheap watching our money, we bought Levolor Premium Faux Wood blinds. Rick did all the difficult work of cutting them down to size and installing them over the weekend. Only eight more to go.
- Redo the glass in the master shower. It's frosted glass, and we want clear. Rick says we can probably do this reasonably inexpensively until/if we want to redo the bathroom.
- Put lights on the back of the house. It's so dark in the backyard at night you can hardly see to the bottom of the steps - so dark, in fact, that Tesla and Diablo with their failing sight are refusing to descent all the way down the stairs at night without an escort.
- Landscaping in the front, and the back. There's minimal landscaping in the front; none at all at the back - I'm talking bare earth here.
There are others, but you get the idea. A lot of them are "wants" as opposed to "needs", but things like the lights and the window treatments are musts.
Anyway, that brings me to the main topic. A few years ago, Rick and I had the opportunity to buy this dining room set at a greatly reduced cost from retail:
(pictures not uploaded since I can't figure how in LJ with my iPad)
We also got this coffee table and end table, along the same style (no idea why these load and the others don't):
They work together really well, especially when we bought a couch/loveseat/chair set that's black leather with chrome.
So in the new house, the dining room set goes into the dining room (duh), and I have the coffee table and end table in the living room. While that worked in the other house, this house looked like it needed a little bit more in it.
When we first got all these tables, I did some research online and found them, and also discovered that that particular line had a console table. We didn't buy it at the time because we thought it was too expensive (like I said, we're cheap. We got the other tables well off retail, and we were too cheap to pay retail for that one). We didn't really need it before anyway, but as I said to Rick, if we could find the console table that matched our coffee table and end table, that would be PERFECT. I said this Saturday morning over breakfast.
"Yeah, I don't think that's going to happen," Rick said. It wasn't an unreasonable statement. We do all of our furniture shopping exclusively at consignment stores. Like I've said before, we're cheap. Plus you can get some astonishing deals, and it's almost like a game of chicken. The price decreases every 21 days, so you can wait and get something for cheaper, or risk that someone else will buy it. "There is no way we are going to find that table at a consignment store."
Rick and I go to the furniture consignment stores in our area every couple weeks, especially when we have something in particular we're searching for. So....on Saturday afternoon, we did our rounds. First to the Lego store (we're not that cheap *g*), and then to our first store. No luck. Then on to the second store. Not 30 feet in the front door, what do I see....
Sure enough, that EXACT console table. To make things better, there's an end table with it.
"Quick, take the tags, take the tags," I told Rick (taking the tags means you're going to buy it). Then we looked at the price.
Two tables, $300. A quick google reveals that these tables are still being sold on retail, and this price is over 80% off.
The console table looks FABULOUS in the living room. I'll take pictures when I get back home.
I love furniture consignment stores.