Question of the Day, Saturday, April 27

[Winchester]

Happy Weekend! (It's raining here!)

Name an item in your house and tell the story behind it. How did you get it? What is its purpose (if it has one)? Show a picture.

Several years ago, we went to an Amish furniture maker about making a bookcase and filing cabinet. I wanted the bookcase for some of my cookbooks and mentioned that I wanted extra-deep shelves (because some books can be rather large). We gave him our deposit and a couple weeks later, he called to ask us when we wanted the furniture delivered.

Well, they got the bookcase up the stairs, but there was no way they were going to make the turn from the hallway into the computer room. It was simply too tall. They took it back outside. Rick took a window out of the computer room. They took the bookcase out to the back of the house and got it in the room via the empty window. That was a chore! Then, after they left, Rick put the window back in. If we ever move, that bookcase will probably go with the house, unless we take the window out again.

 

[Mia6]

i have a beautiful Maxfield parish print from an antique shop.no story.

twilight hour

 

[Kat0121]

This guy. I love yard gnomes and he's very cool. I keep him in the living room because someone would steal him if he was outside.

 

[NY cat man]

A few years ago, we did a kitchen remodel with all new cabinets. The only off note was the microwave stand, which was an el cheapo butcher block style- so I built one that matched the style and color of the new ones, plus I made it a rollaround. It has soft close hinges and drawer slides, hard maple for the framing, and maple veneer plywood panels. It was a wooly booger to build, but build it I did.

 

[fionasmom]

This is only one example of this poster which I own. I have it on trays, binders, boxes, and other posters. I have always liked it, but for some reason everyone I have ever known who has come across it in a gift store has decided to purchase it for me.

 

[catloverfromwayback]

In 2000 I went to Scotland for three weeks to avoid all the nonsense around the Sydney Olympics. I stayed in Edinburgh and found the High Kirk of St Giles had a decent coffee shop for lunch. They also had a gift shop, where I found this gorgeous little chap, who looked just like Hadji when he was a kitten. It's actually a card that folds three ways. I bought two, one for Mum and one for me, had them framed, and we still have them.

 

[catloverfromwayback]

This is only one example of this poster which I own. I have it on trays, binders, boxes, and other posters. I have always liked it, but for some reason everyone I have ever known who has come across it in a gift store has decided to purchase it for me.View attachment 475132

I have that print on an umbrella!

 

[susanm9006]

This is one of my most treasured pieces of furniture. I wandered thru an antique store on my lunch hour one day in 1998, not really shopping, and the owner threw out a price as I glanced at this. It was about the size and shape piece I could use but it was wobbly and had a damaged black finish on it. I guess he was anxious to make a sale or to get rid of it because as I looked at other things he named another lower price and then a third even lower. At that point I said I would take it. I started stripping and refinishing it a few days later, a big job, but under the ugly black paint this beautiful maple emerged. My guess is 1880’s or so and the carving was done by hand.

 

[MonaLyssa33]

I couldn't decide what to share, so I'm sharing both because they are somewhat connected. The first picture is of a Dala horse and a Norwegian flag. I worked a seasonal job at a Swedish museum during the holidays and the Dala horse is a Swedish thing. I'm from Minnesota, so like a lot of Minnesotans I have a lot of Scandinavian ancestry. The second picture is of a quilt art piece that my grandma made. She designed it after a picture my grandpa took of their trip to Norway (I have the picture too). My goal someday is to get a picture of myself in the same location (Gol, Norway where my ancestors were originally from as far back as the 1400s, at least that is as far back as I've been able to find in genealogy records).

 

[iPappy]

My Mom bought this piano in 1990-ish. I played my first notes on this very piano years ago. She gifted it to me when I moved out. I can still play, but, I'm a bit rusty.

 

[MoochNNoodles]

I debated everything from my coffee maker to Mooch; but heres a barn.

…and some dust I guess.

My grandpa and I built this for a school project when I was in elementary school. (Mostly I helped paint and put the display together.) The silo on the right is a painted tube from tp or maybe paper towels. I had it in a trunk in my mom’s attic till she moved last year. I think it looks really cute on my china cabinet now. I have my grandparents ashes in the china cabinet in very nondescript urns; but they are too big to fit inside the barn still. I would LOVE to hear what they would have said about that!

 

[catapault]

Winchester I'll see you and raise you one - not my story but still a very good one. When Himself was a teenager he had a friend whose family owned a three family apartment house in Brooklyn (which is where he and they and all the others in the group were living at the time.) Anyhow - friend, friend's brother, their father built a boat. In the basement. They could get it into the back courtyard through the bulkhead doors but not up the stairs and out to the street. So . . .

They hoisted the boat up to the roof (remember, three stories) walked it across, and lowered the boat down to the street. Ingenuity and the proto-engineering mind at work.

 

[rubysmama]

After cats, my next favourite animal is elephants, and I'd wanted a photo for my wall for years. Finally found this poster at IKEA a few years ago, and bought one of their frames to display it.

 

[iPappy]

After cats, my next favourite animal is elephants, and I'd wanted a photo for my wall for years. Finally found this poster at IKEA a few years ago, and bought one of their frames to display it.

View attachment 475221

Elephants are so awesome. Their social structure,empathy, and memory capacity is pretty astounding.

 

[fionasmom]

I have that print on an umbrella!

As I walked through my house later, I realized that I was remiss in adding the fridge magnets, dish towels, and canvas shopping bag.

 

[Margot Lane]

This is a brass pneumatic tube carrier similar to the one my mother used when she worked as a secretary in the 1940s for Lord and Taylors in New York City. Below it are hatpins my great aunt wore when she was a suffragette. I chose them b/c they represent freedom for women, and b/c the tube is such a nifty thing to hold; what use it serves now I have no idea.