Summer Street Fair: A woman, a sideboard and a bookshelf

One of the activities we squeezed in last weekend was a quick trip to Ikea.  I love Ikea, it's one of my happy places.  I know that it's generally not liked by the chaps, and certainly we passed our share of undergruntled gentlemen in the carpark, no doubt waiting for their partners to return to them loaded with the best of the Snurgg range.  There were guys actually in the shop, following their partners with that slump-shouldered look of surrender which shows they lost the fight before they even got to the carpark.

I did overhear one male moan to his wife/partner/girlfriend/significant other that she didn't need whatever it was she was looking at.  I shivered. There was a sharp intake of breath from the women around her, and for a moment there you could have heard a pin drop. I gently leaned over and said 'Of course you do'.  She fixed him with one of those special looks and replied 'I know.'  I wonder how his evening went? Perhaps some sort of man-minding room would be a good idea, they do it for the kids.

Among the things we women dragged to the bollards (you can't take the trolleys further) and thence to the vehicle was that old fave, the Billy bookcase.

*You have to respect your next door neighbor when she can tell the contents of an Ikea box in a trailer from afar by name - but then she is from Sweden originally.

So, having had 30 kilos of woman-handled Billy taking up floorspace all week, I decided to sort out the loungeroom on Saturday.  

I had been very pleased with the way the Danish mid-century modern sideboard had polished up.  There were some major and minor marks on the finish, as one might expect from something from the tip shop.  Earlier in the week I invested wisely in some of my favourite restorative products.  Here's an example of what this stuff can do.  And it's made in Western Australia, too.

before

after

My tried and true technique for furniture moving had the sideboard in place in a snip.

Feeling rather smug, I moved on to assemble the Billy.  Given the size and weight of it,  I put it together in the lounge.  Easy peasy, I really don't know what husbands make such a fuss of.  Read the instructions, follow the instructions. Wrestling with it by myself in a confined space added a piquant pinch of degree of difficulty but it was pretty straightforward.  Then, I got to play bookshelf shuffle as those displaced were moved about, finally expelling the smallest and most expendable onto the back veranda.

The pickings in the opshops here were pretty good on Friday. Amongst my entire summer wardrobe of light cotton and/or linen pants, books, an old tin and quite a lot of broken jewellery, I picked up a 9kt solid gold bracelet and a hollow bangle, also 9kt.  Somedays, the force is truly with you.

Saturday's round of  garage sales were much more limited, although  I got a lovely homegrown pumpkin for $2 at the Baptist fundraiser, and a nice hoard of stuff from an estate sale, including a watch fob - soon to be a bracelet, another sieve cum shadow box, some plastic dogs exactly like the ones I had as a child, and a big bag of matchbox covers.  The bag also included an unused label from the local (now defunct) fish cannery, some WA Railways parcel stamps, a sign from a drycleaners, and some gorgeous old  WA matchbox covers.  It was a bag of history, right there in my hand.

The thing I like about these funny old things is that now I'll go and do some research on them and poke about and find out a whole heap of stuff about this place I never knew.  The monetary value isn't important, but I like to think that the nice gentleman who collected them would appreciate my enjoyment of them.  I may put some of them in frames because I think they would make a rather nice display of local history.