Thursday, July 12, 2007

file cabinet woes

Good news, I got my Abatron stuff in the mail so I'm all set to get to work. I'm planning on hitting it hard this weekend. In the meantime, I have some pics of an antique file cabinet I picked up several months ago. My wife and I were browsing at a local place called Placita Santa Fe in the upper valley which, as the name implies, is a mini santa fe style market. Lots of neat things to check out and on this particular day, something caught my eye. That would be this file cabinet. Now my wife had been complaining for months that we needed a file cabinet and had been browsing the pottery barns, crate & barrels of the world but we just couldn't find anything we could agree on. One thing we definitely wanted that often turned out to be the deal breaker was it had to be solid wood. I suggested a few arts & crafts websites that definitely looked high quality, but were on the pricey end. So we kept looking.

Back to the antique shop where we found it.. As soon as I saw it I was in love. Yes it's missing the side panels and yes it had a minor amount of termite damage, but I figured what the heck. For $120 it was mine. Considering that some of the new-old arts & crafts cabinets I'd been looking at were in the $800+ range I was happy. It actually came out of an old schoolhouse in Brooklyn and I figure is circa 1920s - 1930s. And I know of just the person who can take this rough piece and turn it into a gem. There's a carpenter in town my bro-in-law introduced me to and I'm confident he'll be able to make my vision for this thing a reality. It seems so simple. Match the side panels to the rear and replace any pieces of wood too damaged by termites. I'll keep you posted. In fact he's done work for me before, but I'll save that blog post for a rainy day. But first I've got to get it out of my foyer. It's been sitting there since I bought it, fulfilling my wife's prediction. ;)

2 comments:

Dulcie said...

Gorgeous filing cabinet! I would love something like that.

Omar said...

Thanks! Yep it's a beaute.. couldn't pass it up despite the few things I have to get fixed. The missing side panels were actually on purpose. Apparently the schoolhouse had rows of these side by side so they were built like that. Or at least that's what I was told.. Sounds plausible.