Loft Living

Master bedroom update:  it's movin' along

The master bedroom, or as we like to call it, the studio loft, is now looking much more habitable.  Just a few short months ago, this was nothing but a storage space crammed floor-to-ceiling with jumbles of MCM junk. 

It still requires some finishing touches like drywall repair, paint, some electrical wiring, and general decorating, but I like the way is coming together.  That's quite a result for a room that's just full of all the leftover furniture that didn't make the cut for downstairs.  A dining table in the bedroom?  It's the next hot trend!

Movin' on up

In order to make up for my extended absence, I've got a special treat for you all.

I don't believe that you and my second story have ever met.  After the disastrous pre-blog roof leak of 2011, the subsequent lack of access for cleaning, and the furniture hoarding (Oh, all the furniture hoarding...), it was looking quite the mess up there.

The room pretty much became a dusty, musty dumping ground for everything that I'd pulled out of alleys/dumpsters or found at estate sales and didn't have a place for.  1940's homes don't have the storage required for modern living, much less the life of a furniture hoarding freak, so there simply wasn't anywhere else to put it except the basement and that was already packed with my non-furniture junk.

This is the way our situation remained until my girlfriend visited last week and finally convinced me to get moving on a project that I'd thought would take years: making the master bedroom a master bedroom.

This required completely reorganizing the basement with new shelving and tidy, labeled containers.  Then came the task of dragging all the pieces that I wished to sell down two narrow, twisted stairways and into the basement, where it would be categorized and out of sight of the living areas.

Phew.

A bit of tidying/arranging and one seriously aggravating set of Home Depot blinds later, everything is looking pretty snazzy.  We've got a real, honest-to-goodness master bedroom now!

Beginner's Luck

Over the last several months, My girlfriend and I have made a habit of visiting area thrift stores in the hope that we might stumble across some treasures. A few items have made the cut so far, but one of our earliest scores turned out to be my personal favorite.

This amazing bedroom set was sitting in the basement of the local Salvation Army, just begging to come home with us (the pictures don't really do it justice).

It wasn't marked, so I inquired about the price and waited ... and waited ... for a manager. An hour later (and after witnessing a fellow shopper walk off with a pair of sandals shoved into his pants) we were loading everything into the van and on our way home.

It's no Broyhill Brasilia, but I find the lines, on the lo-boy in particular, very attractive. The set looks almost Streamline Moderne and reminiscent of the front end of a 1951 Buick LeSabre.

There are, naturally, a few imperfections. The finish is worn and the wood is bone-dry, but the pieces are in passable condition. If I get some practice in, they might be good candidates for a Howard's Feed-n-Wax treatment. In the mean time, I'm attempting to identify them. There is a United Furniture Corp. stamp, but I can't seem to find anything on the line to which they belong. Any ideas?