Antique Shopping

If you would have asked me even 5 years ago if you would catch me antique shopping, I would have said “No way!”  It’s crazy how much life changes and you change along the way.  Nowadays, one of Matt and my favorite things to do is to browse through antique stores and hopefully find a good piece or two for our home.  One needs to have an open and creative mind when walking through an antique store.  It’s not going to be set up like a staged Ashley Furniture store and everything is going to be cluttered and overwhelming. 

If you aren’t familiar with antique shopping, let me tell you how it works.  If you are familiar, skip this paragraph J.  Most antique stores are set up as little rooms called booths.  One person has usually worked out a deal to have that space within the store to set up their antiques to sell.  Thus, sometimes you may see a sign that says 20% (or any amount) off this entire booth.  That booth owner has elected to try to entice people to buy their stuff.  So keep a look out for discount signs within every booth!

Now I have a few words of advice for someone who is about to go antique shopping.

1.       Don’t get overwhelmed!  Look at individual pieces within a booth instead of trying to look at the whole booth at once.  If you have to stand at one booth for a while in order to take it all in, that’s okay!

2.       Think about the potential of a piece instead of the condition it is in right now.  Could you make a shelf out of that awesome old milk crate?  Could you use those old shutters as wall decoration?  Could you distress the frame around that mirror to make it look up to date?

3.       Almost always, the store/shop owner is willing to come down in price.  Even a 10% mark down is at least tax, right!?

Also, don’t expect to only find old pieces in antique stores.  Lots of times a booth owner will have already tried to spruce up some of their old pieces to look distressed, reupholstered, painted, etc. to fit with the current, popular, design styles.

Matt and I had some free time in between the ceremony and reception of his sister’s wedding this past weekend.  Lucky for us while we were driving to the reception site we saw an antique mall!  We were super pumped.  We found several things we liked but ended up buying one piece.



This beautiful chair was only $67!  At any big store, you can’t find a unique chair like this let alone for this price.  We are going to place it in one of our guest bedrooms as we are going for a French Country/City of Paris design themed décor for that room.