Roadside furniture

Cristy and I are in the midst of purchasing a house, selling our two respective houses and integrating our dogs, our personal belongings and our lives under a single roof. Our new house is large. Larger than our two separate places combined. We know that we don’t have enough furnishings to make it look lived-in, and we’re both OK with that fact. Part of the fun of embarking on this adventure will be selecting things for our home together, for perhaps many years to come.

One of the things we joke about (I think we’re joking, anyway) is the abundance of abandoned furniture along side the road and the world of opportunity that exists for low-cost, high-style decorating à la Loop 610-Boutique. We’re not thinking of old cast-off furniture that people carry out to the curb for heavy-trash pickup day (although that is another idea altogether!). We’re just focusing on a few core prospects: a lone chest-of-drawers or easy-chair sitting alongside the freeway. Dust it off, spray on a little Fabreze, perhaps whip out a can of spray paint, and we’re in business.

Where does this furniture come from, anyway? That’s the point of this rambling essay. The most obvious answer is that these items belonged to someone who packed them into the back of someone’s pickup truck en route to a new apartment/condo/house. And then, as they say: “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum.” Boy-oh-boy, I would be stinking mad if any of my chair cushions or box springs met that fate!

With my well-known frugal nature, I probably pay closer attention to these roadside specimens than the average commuter, but it is unlikely that I would actually ever attempt to retrieve an article of abandoned furniture. I’m not sure who really does pick them up, but I hope some of them do get a second lease on life with a coat of spray paint and a spritz of Fabreze.