Making Vintage, Used & Antiques A Part of a Home

Happy Saturday!

We hope everyone out there reading this is having a great weekend so far! We're busy making frames, but we wanted to share a blog post with you about something that has become a hobby of ours! Before we moved in to our townhouse this past summer, we had started to enjoy searching for used furniture and home items. First, it's a great way to save money, and for us- we enjoy seeing a piece that may need some work and some TLC!

So, this blog post is a way for us to spotlight some items in our home and show you how we've taken some older and used items and made them our own! We'll also share some of our favorite places to shop for stuff like this in the Jackson area.

Up first, Forget Me Nots of Brandon. We've written about this store before in a post here. But since then, we've of course been back to Forget Me Nots AND they've moved to a bigger and better location in Brandon. They feature new items in (almost) daily Facebook albums on their fan page. Often, we see an item in these albums and call and have them hold it until we can make it out there later that day! The owner is Melanie and she is very nice- so if you go to Forget Me Nots- introduce yourself! You can probably tell we've been there several times, ha! So... some of the items in our home from Forget Me Nots:

First, the desk chair that we've previously blogged about. This chair sits in Jonathan's office and gets lots of use! Like I blogged about before, chairs like these sell at Pottery Barn for about $300. We paid about $65!

This trunk that we use as a coffee table. It looks great in our house and it has lots of storage inside for our DVD collection.

I got this hutch several months ago. we plan to paint it some day when we get around to it, but it is the perfect size in our current house. (Ignore the junk around it!)

We got this wicker chair recently instead of spending a lot of money on a bigger chair for our living room. We actually painted it not long ago! We'll blog about that process some day soon. It still needs a seat cushion, but it looks good in our living room (also ignore those ugly vertical blinds - one of the things I dislike about renting).

We also go this cool bench that we use when we go to markets with our picture frames (also previously blogged about). This picture is from our old apartment!

There are some other cool consignment stores in the area as well! The Orange Peel in Fondren gets interesting stuff and they specialize in clothing and have a lot of vintage clothing. We picked up this magazine rack there over a year ago. We gave it a coat of spray paint, but we may redo it in some other fun color some day soon.

Repeat Street in North Jackson has LOTS of furniture, home items, books and clothing! It's one of Jackson's biggest consignment shops. We've never gotten any furniture there, but we did pick up these bird prints on canvas for cheap (after we'd already purchased them somewhere else for retail price- we returned that set).

Okay...moving to some places to find antiques! We love antique shops, whether it be small ones or big antique flea market-type places. We have a couple favorites! Our favorite antique shop here in Clinton is When Pigs Fly. It's in Olde Town Clinton and the owners (The Gatewoods) are very nice! We've gotten a few things from When Pigs Fly.

 First, this vintage metal cart that we use in the office for storage and printers.

Second, another vintage metal cart that we use in our kitchen. We have a sort-of awkward window ledge in our kitchen, so we decided to utilize the space and put this cart on the ledge for our microwave and storage.

And lastly, one of our favorite pieces in our home is this antique dresser that was painted and distressed in red. We use it in our living room for our television to sit on. My mom says one day it will look great in a kid's room- ha!

Other antique places we like to shop? 

The Flea Market in Flowood has tons of vendors and lots of cool stuff! Warning though: it's in an old warehouse and there's no A/C. So, save this place for somewhere you go in a month, or so, when it starts to cool down!  We got this cool vintage mirror there! I love this mirror! We haven't decided where to put it in our house. When we do, the frame will probably get a coat of spray paint!

49 South Antiques & Flea Market is located on Highway 49 South (obviously) past Florence. There are (I think) 3 buildings FULL of antiques! We stopped by there a couple of weeks ago on our way back from Destin and we were amazed! So many antiques- a lot of the prices were REALLY good- and tons of pieces that would look awesome redone!

We got this cool magazine rack (yeah, we like magazines and magazine racks, obviously). It would also look good sitting on top of a buffet holding plates on each level. It might get a spray paint job sometime soon...

Some other cool stores you can visit to find cool used stuff? Thrift stores like Goodwill, the 4C's in Clinton or the Salvation Army. These places are completely hit or miss. Some days you can walk in and find awesome stuff, and some days you'll only find junk. The Salvation Army thrift store (located on Presto lane near County Line Road Target in Jackson) usually has a good selection of furniture. 

So... last but not least, one of our favorite places to find used stuff and get GREAT deals: CRAIGSLIST! Like a thrift store, Craigslist can be hit or miss... but people are always posting new stuff. We spend a lot of time looking at the furniture pages just to see what's out there.... but as you might know, you can search for most anything on Craigslist- furniture, cars, home rentals, etc. Here are some of our Craigslist finds:

This awesome, retro desk that we use in our office (we blogged about the office here). We only paid $50 for this desk! It's Jonathan favorite thing we've purchased used.

We bought our old kitchen table on Craigslist. We recently found one we liked better (on Craigslist), so we re-Craigslisted this one and sold it just a couple of weeks ago!

We also bought two of these bar stools for our kitchen. We had plans to paint these but haven't gotten around to it. We're actually going to probably re-Craigslist these very soon in favor of some bar stools that we think fit our style better!

We also purchased an antique radio cabinet off Craigslist for $30! The record player / radio no longer worked, but we bought it because we liked the way it looked. We had plans to use to hold our TV, but then the beautiful antique dresser came along. It's currently in the garage (actually being used to store picture frame materials) so I didn't get a picture of it.

Probably my favorite purchase we have ever found on Craigslist is our NEW dining room table. I had been wanting a farmhouse table for quite a while (even before we bought the first table)- but we couldn't find one at a decent price. This one popped up on Craigslist a couple weeks ago and we went out to Flowood to look at it. It turned out the table was brand new and handmade! So, we bought it and sold the old one on Craigslist. Now, to just find chairs we love!

We also found our current house on Craigslist! It turned out we (sort of) knew the landlords and knew the current tenants, but we still would have never found it without Craigistlist. I'm sure some of you reading have never bought or sold anything on Craigslist and you may be skeptical. We have some rules we go by that we want to recommend to you if you find something you want on Craigslist. 

1. When you find out the person's name who has the item- be a stalker! Look them up on Facebook- make sure they don't look completely creepy on Facebook. Although they could be creepy in real life, even if they look normal on Facebook- at least you can maybe see what they look like and find out a few things about them. 

2. If you decide to purchase something and you're going to pick it up at their house- look it up on Google maps. Find out what neighborhood it's in. Make sure you're not going to a sketchy area of town.

3. When you go to pick something up- take someone with you. Jonathan and I always go together or he takes someone with him to help him.

4. Tell some other people where you're going- in case anything did happen. Although, usually these transactions happen pretty smoothly- you'd better be safe than sorry. So let someone else know where you are headed to pick up an item, the person's name who has the item, etc.

So, we've definitely made a hobby out of antique and consignment shopping- whether it be in stores or online. We hope maybe some of our suggestions will encourage you to go searching for something for your home too!