Now that Frank and I are married and he has moved in, we are in the process of turning my bachelorette pad into a house that works for both of us. One of the key issues that we have is clothing storage. When I remodeled the second floor I combined two tiny bedrooms to make a master bedroom and reworked the floor plan to make the closet as large as possible. The closet is pretty decently sized now (especially for a 130+ year old house) but it isn't enough space for both of us to store all of our clothes.
Knowing that closet space was going to be an issue, this past spring I started looking around at some of my favorite places in town as well as Craigslist for an antique armoire. Everything I found seemed a bit too fussy looking for my tastes or not big enough for our needs. Then earlier this summer I stumbled across this ad on Craigslist for an enormous armoire.
At nearly seven feet tall and six feet wide it was the armoire of armoires so I showed the listing to Frank. It was enormous, but we both liked the style and it would easily take care of our clothing storage needs. The only hitch was that it was located an hour south of us. We decided to gamble on it so I called the shop and asked them to hold it for us. We rented a flatbed trailer and hoped that the armoire was as nice in person as it looked in the pictures.
When we got to the shop we made a beeline for the armoire. We knew it was going to be big, but it seemed even more enormous in person. The oak was quite pretty and each of the panels was trimmed out with small egg and dart molding. The armoire had a large drawer at the bottom and the top had enough space for me to build two shelves and a hanging rod for clothing. We decided we wanted to get the armoire if we could negotiate the price down a little bit.
The shop was actually in partnership with a few other shops that were linked together. Unfortunately, the owner of the armoire was on vacation so no one actually manning the store that day could discuss the price with us. Luckily, the guy at the register had the owner's cell phone so I called her and worked down the price from out on the street since there was no cell reception in the store. It was a bit comical at the time but in the end it all worked out.
While we were there Frank and I took a little look around the rest of the shops. There was a lot of neat stuff for sale and if I had unlimited budget and space at home I would have filled up the car and trailer.
I couldn't resist buying a tin mail sorter that I found near the register. After I clean it up I think it will make for some awesome storage in my craft room. We also got a cool ten gallon stone crock that we plan to use for making pickles later this summer.
Once we checked out the next trick was trying to load up our purchases. The crock and mail sorter easily fit into the back of Frank's SUV, but getting the armoire out of the store and into the trailer was quite a feat. After some wrangling and fancy dolly work we were all set and on the road back north.
Since there was no way that the two of us were going to get the behemoth armoire up the stairs by ourselves, when we got home we used our dolly to get it into the garage and there it has sat ever since. Frank is understandably getting pretty tired of having his clothes hanging up on a cheap metal clothes rack so we need get on reorganizing the bedroom to make space and moving the armoire up there!