I was shopping the other day, looking for a smallish vintage bookcase for the hallway upstairs. We need to build bookcases in the den – have needed to build them since we moved in – and still haven’t. We have boxes of books out in the shed, books in the bedroom, books everywhere. This doesn’t include the boxes of books I sent home from San Diego, many of which are work-related. The point is: I have too many books and no place to put them! I wanted a cute little narrow bookshelf that would hold a huge volume of Shakespeare’s plays, all sorts of textbooks, etc.
I found a lot of bookshelves, but none of them were the right size. I know this happens to you, dear readers; you go in the shop for one thing but come out with 3 things that have nothing to do with your original intention. That happened to me the other day. Here is what I bought:
This is a vintage laundry bag. Hand embroidered on gorgeous, soft linen. I fell in love with it. Look at that fringe! I had no idea at the time where I was going to put it, I just knew I had to have it.
I also fell in love with this chippy bench.
I originally thought I would put it in the upstairs hallway and stack some books on the lower shelf. As often happens in this house, my husband had another idea and it was a better one. We placed it in front of the always-closed-french-door-on-the-left leading into the den. I had already decided that the laundry bag would look wonderful hanging from that same french door. The light filters through the linen beautifully.
I bought the large frog in San Diego. The bricks have their own story – they are from the theater-in-the-round in San Diego where both my husband and I worked. It is our favorite of the 3 theaters in the complex and last year it was razed in order to build a bigger theater. That made us sad. A friend of mine passed along the bricks so that we might have a little piece of this much-loved place.
Still need a bookcase. And bookshelves in the den. But we love these new additions to our home, found by chance while looking for something else.
