Inside the real Dr. Err's house

I have, maybe, a slight furniture addiction. You have shoes, or electronic gadgets or earings…soshuddupaboutit. I only have a few pieces that aren’t old. Functional shit that I had to have, like my book cases. But they, at least, look old. Almost all of my furniture is what they call, ‘farmhouse primitives.’ Which is real damn funny when you consider that I’ve never so much as set foot in a farm house. Most of what I live with was constructed not by a company, but more likely by some farmer/carpenter/handyman just prior to the Civil War. There are all kinds of ways that you can tell, but you didn’t on purpose click on a history of furniture blog, did you?

I like the clean lines, the worn areas, the rough areas and the cool technologies of the time (like keeping doors of cabinets shut by turning the knobs to the side). I like how it feels to live with old things. Knowing that your pie safe or dry sink has seen countless wars, families, good times and bad times is somehow reassuring. It reminds you that time rolls on. I feel like these things are special. I feel privileged to get to be the keeper of them for a time. I have collected slowly since I was young and I find myself attached to most of my pieces. That said, I don’t buy new whatever usually. I just move stuff. Dry sinks in the hall way, dressers in the kitchen, a pie safe in the living room.

I also feel like it’s a more green way to go about my life. I’m recycling old furniture instead of filling landfills with trends that have ended. Really, though, I’m sure that’s a stretch and no doubt you’ll read in my blog someday about how I’ve recently started glowing in the dark or some damn thing because of led paint from my furniture.

It’s no secret I tend to lean toward the old from my mom, who got it from her grandmother who despite being very seriously economically fragile had a lovely house. I thought until I was near twenty that they were wealthy. Until I did the math that pointed out how no one with any serious jack lived in a triple in a neighborhood that I like to describe as, “one that is on the news a lot.” On top of that, WM has a shop that is a kind of a cross between Crate and Barrel, Restoration Hardware and a back East antique shop. She’s been in the business since I was around 12. That’s twenty years I’ve been hustling antiques with her. I remember being in 6th grade and getting a treadle sewing machine for Christmas. IRL friends....its the one that the old record player sits on under the MLK picture. I can’t even count the times I’ve sat in a crowded car with some damn thing jammed in my ear or on my lap or under my feet. Or more recently driving a loaded down truck that makes me look like Fred Sanford himself. WM and I regularly hum the theme song during these times. And folks, you can’t lean to the side enough to compensate for looking like the Beverly Hillbillies when you’re driving through Buckeye Fried Chicken ….

One of the times that we loaded a truck down like this was soon after moving back to our home state when I was about 19. My mom had bought a beautiful pie safe at a farm auction with blue milk paint. It was larger than most, over 5 feet tall and almost 4 feet wide. It weighed roughly 90 million pounds. So naturally, WP (wonder Pop) and I had to carry it across a farm and into a ditch. As we straddled the ditch (me whimpering not because of the heavy thing or splinters, but because there had to be snakes in there…DADDY!!!!!) we somehow broke the back leg the rest of the way off (many of these pieces had been chewed on by rats or in homes that had flooded). WM was pissed at the both of us. It took up all the room in their Explorer. Thinking back, I don’t know how in the holy hell it fit in there in the first place, but I knew that riding home with one pissed off WM in my lap for an hour was step 1.

It was one of the first pieces she put in the original building of her new shop after closing the one we had left across the country. I loved it. It was a caliber of farm house primitive that I’d only seen in Country Living. Needing storage she decided to mark it NFS (not for sale). Over the years many people tried to buy the piece. As I became an adult with an adult job, a married person, and then a homeowner, I coveted the piece even more. Particularly because I worked part time in WM’s shop and opened it lovingly every day to pull stock. Every time she would comment on how someone had made a generous offer, I would remind her that if she ever were to sell it… I wanted first dibs.

Eventually, she moved into a 4,000 square foot new shop with a whole storage room and shelves and new fangled things like work tables (I’d priced for ten years in my lap). The blue cupboard stayed behind in storage in the old shop. I reminded WM that someday, if she didn’t want it, I would buy it and that I called ‘dibs.’ She told me, that she wouldn’t sell it to me. It was a particularly horrible time in becoming Dr. Err. It was a time when I didn’t know if I was cut out to be Dr. Err, if I could do it, or if I even wanted to. She told me, very matter-of-factly that when I became Dr. Err, I could have it.

Don’t look too shabby, do it?