So mom and I have been on a mission lately to finally get me a sewing machine as my belated Christmas 2008 gift from Santa. That’s a story for another day. However while on Craig’s List looking to pick up a vintage Kenmore, I happened to spot a brightly colored piece of furniture that had my Pinterest heart all aflutter. Aflutter I tell you.
So one week later a teal armoire was mine. That’s right, teal. I love my apartment and continue to put my type-A tendencies to work to find creative storage solutions to a place without a proper closet. You know, like how I have socks in an ottoman next to my sofa. Anywho. Real furniture is expensive, and some assembly required furniture is pretty hit or miss in terms of style and proportion for me. So imagine my delight when this very heavy real piece of furniture was only 100 smackeroos. Smell ya later $1600 Anthropologie furniture.
The color is the best part. Because it is the exact color of the high jump that took me six years to work up the nerve to jump off, I call it public swimming pool blue.
Where did I place this gem you ask? (pay no attention to my hasty (lack of) staging of the photo)
Bam, right when you walk in the door. I relocated the singer sewing table (also acquired via Craig’s List) to live underneath the TV. The wardrobe has three or four blue shelves currently housing vases, serving dishes, my Halloween costume and scraps of fabric for other projects. The shelves are also tall enough to make a really fun Barbie house, which definitely did not go through my mind the first time my 28 year old self laid eyes on the interior. Just saying. It could have been the belated Christmas 1990 gift from Santa.
The woman I bought it from actually picked it up for free out of someone’s trash pile/yard and spent a month painting it blue and distressing it. Formerly it was brown with gold hardware. Yowza. She learned that she had to move and was more than ready to get rid of it. In turn, I was pretty eager to pick it up… figuratively, cause that mother was crushingly heavy.
Now I am not someone who names things often. Unlike, say, my sister who names anything she comes in contact with more than once. That’s a lot to manage. However this funky vintage piece in some way replaces the void left by the antique dress form that once called my apartment home. RIP Beatrice. So in keeping with the old lady moniker (those names are always the best, no?) I immediately thought of the name Gladyce. Similar, starts with GLAD. Hello who wouldn’t want to be greeted by something glad every time they walked in the door.
Except though it rolled off the tongue I had no idea how to spell it. So I googled the first spelling that came to mind.
I thought all baby names were like ‘of the laurels’ or something equally as pleasant. Not so much? Nothing wrong with being disabled, although that feels like sort of a harsh sentence to serve up to the ole girl. We are just getting to know each other. While I was trying to convince myself that perhaps being disabled would make this antique piece one degree closer to being a Kennedy, I couldn’t resist clicking on the enticing Facebook link.
Bahahahaha. I love it.
Still I felt duty bound to explore other possible names. How about the wardrobe from beauty and the beast? After all the ornate hardware could have been French in another life. Her name is Madame De Le Grande Bouche which literally translates to big mouth (she was the opera singer pre beast curse). We do a lot of singing around my place, but five words is a lot to use when casually referring to an inanimate object.
Or even from my now cancelled but beloved soaps, Opal from All My Children (full name Opal Sue Gardner Purdy Courtland). She loves tacky jewelry and doctor phil-esque folksy sayings. I would love to come home to that, but my knowledge of her marriages would have me wanting to use all her names as well.
So there I was already calling the armoire Gladys. The name stuck so I modified the spelling and I like to think that makes her a little more handi-capable.
Come over and see the pretty new blue piece of furniture!
