If you know me, you know I love my sleep...especially on the weekends because we like to stay in bed as long as possible. Welp, that wasn't in the cards for me this morning since I hit the road bright and early to a little town called Opwijk here in Belgium.
Lemme explain...for the last few weeks, I've been on the hunt for a trunk. Yes, a trunk. Not like a footlocker style trunk you can buy in the store or whatever, but an antique looking one to go with all the other cool goodies I've found since we've been here. I've come across several nice ones throughout my search, but I'm not willing to pay the prices that some of the sellers are asking for. Think in terms of 400-1000 euro. Yeah, noooo thanks.
A gal from here posted about a gorgeous fainting couch she found on a website that's pretty much a Belgian version of Craigslist. It's 2dehands.be . So of course I took an interest in the site because, hey, who knows what you'll find on there. Sure enough, I spotted a whole section that was dedicated to antiques of all kinds and trunks! Lots and lots of trunks!! After sifting through lots of ads and getting Eric's opinion on the ones I liked, I finally found one that we both agreed on because of how it looked AND the price was pretty reasonable. Thing is, it wasn't in the nearby area. It was a good hour and a half from here:
After emailing back and forth with the seller, today had to be the best day to run over there to snag the trunk since I'm not willing to deal with Brussels traffic during the week (who in their right mind WOULD??), especially since it'd be during rush hour, and we have plans to go to Germany next weekend. So, this was definitely a "smash & grab" mission. Eric wasn't feelin' the whole vibe of going since he wanted to relax, so I ventured off on my own and hoped for the best that the people weren't ax murderers or something along those lines.
Luckily, they were VERY nice people and were thoroughly amused with the fact that I'm an American that was using a site that was in a completely different language. Then they picked my brain about the United States as well as California since they were wanting to travel there sometime for a vacation.
When they showed me the trunk, it was definitely larger than I realized since it seemed smaller on the site. The size reference they used didn't match up with the actual piece, lol. While I'm checking it over, the husband starts giving me info on it cause I was curious about how they got their paws on it. Apparently, it was a gift from when they got married twenty five years ago and they were wanting to get rid of it since he built them a nice wine rack. They had been using the trunk all these years for storing their wine in a cool spot and since they completely remodeled & decorated their house, the trunk wasn't needed anymore. Benny, the husband, was VERY proud of his wood work because he gave me a tour around the house to show me all the stuff he built..it all looked professionally done, lots of clean lines like Ikea, so I can see how the trunk didn't fit in with their house anymore.
Of course, I gladly purchased it even though there's a part of me thinking "How could you sell off something this cool that was given to you at your wedding?". Things come and go, I suppose!
Cole gave his seal of approval on the new addition for our collection.
In all honesty, it needs a little TLC since the leather strapping's have dry rot and needs to be replaced, and then there's a hinge on the back that needs to be repaired. The exterior needs some elbow grease when it comes to polishing it up and I think I might fix the interior by sanding it down and staining it darker, maybe install a fabric liner since we intend to use this for our bedroom as something to store our throw pillows in. I dunno, maybe I'll see if I can find someone locally who can do restoration work on it since I wanna make sure *I* don't screw it up.
Now, time for me to go enjoy the rest of my Sunday :)
0 comments:
Post a Comment