Have sofa, will travel.

My husband and I went to a few antique shops yesterday afternoon... a nice drive into Navasota and College Station. We stopped at one shop and found a wonderful old bookcase with glass doors.... beautiful old piece that looked about 100 years old... priced a bit too high, but the owner suggested he would give us a better price. We're still thinking about that one..... I would have bought it on the spot.... but my husband is doing the thinking. Most of the shops in Navasota were closed, but in the largest and nicest shop there, not only were they open but they were chock-full of everything under the sun. This particular shop is in a huge 100-year-old house very similar to our own home.

We had talked about getting a larger sofa for the living room... and my husband surprised me by suggesting we start looking for one. Never let it be said that I would disagree with a man who wants to go shopping. The sofa we had in the living room here was from the old house..... the living room we used to have was just as big, but we had more furniture in it so the sofa had to be a love seat size. It looked great in the old house, but too small in this house. (In this larger house, our furniture is spread out into more rooms.)

Wonder of wonders.... in this beautiful antique shop, there was the perfect sofa..... ivory brocade fabric on a 1940s sofa. Not only a sofa, but a matching love seat as well. The prices were more than perfect.... but did we want both pieces? We paid for the sofa, not realizing that the woman in the shop couldn't deliver it. Oh my.

I called our friend J... she has a truck..... and was more than willing to bring us to pick up the sofa today. Between our house and the shop, I decided to get the love seat if the woman would give us an even better price than she did yesterday. My husband's idea was to use the love seat on the third floor.... we're planning to turn that big room into a library, and the ivory love seat would be the perfect style and size. Before I could even ask for a good walking-out-the-door price on that love seat, the woman offered it to us for $75 less than she quoted yesterday. Sold. Now we had two pieces of furniture for J's truck.

While my husband and I got the sofa and the love seat into the back of the truck, J walked around the shop and found some treasures for her own house. We're planning to go back there and rescue them from the shop and bring them to her home. We're also planning to go antique hunting on a regular basis. Have truck, will travel. And, of course, there's a sign in that shop that clearly says "Your husband just called... he said to buy whatever you want."

For two hours this evening, I arranged and re-arranged the living room, the TV room, and even some of the upstairs rooms. The new antique sofa is in the living room, the one that was there is in the TV room, and the one that was in the TV room is now in the living room of the guest house in the barn. Perfect. The matching love seat to the 'new' sofa in our living room is in the guest cottage, looking very nice in there, but it will eventually come back into the main house here and go up to the third floor library...... when the third floor becomes a library.

I switched coffee tables and chairs, end tables and tea tables...... when you move one thing, it just leads to moving something else. This afternoon and this evening was like playing in a life-sized doll house..... but all the rooms are together now..... coffee tables and tea tables are in the perfect places... chairs from upstairs were moved downstairs, and a couple of chairs from downstairs were carried upstairs. (Of course, all the little elves came out of hiding to help with the moving.)

When we drove to College Station yesterday, my husband and I went to one of the big-name furniture stores.... we looked at bookcases and wall units. I also peeked at some sofas as we walked around the store. Everything was so new..... not a scratch anywhere. Perfectly perfect, in a no-one-lives-here sort of way. That's not how I want my house to look. This is a 100-year-old home.... it has a history, a significance. The scratches and scrapes on antique furniture give it a history, a character, a personality... a life. I look at my 'new' sofa in the living room and wonder about its original owners. I think about that old glass-fronted bookcase we didn't buy (yet) and wonder if the rope burns on the wood were made decades ago when it had been tied to a wagon going across the Texas desert. (Okay, that's a stretch, but you never know.)

I grew up mostly in my grandmother's houses, both of which were filled with old furniture.... and what they had was taken care of for decades and decades..... not replaced because they went out of style, but loved all the more because they were out of style. (I can still hear my Uncle Mino saying "They don't make wood furniture like this anymore.")

I love, love, love antique and resale shops...... the treasures in those stores aren't new... they're better than new because they've been loved and polished and moved around from place to place and who knows how many houses a piece of antique furniture has been in before it finds itself in your home..... and then you get to love it and polish it and arrange and re-arrange it from room to room.....

Life is good. I'm coming up on my 60th birthday. Take a breath. Life is still good. But 60..... Give me a blessed break.