If you are into Arts & Crafts furniture as much as I am

Next Friday, Pleasant Home Foundation is hosting a great event. Mike Danial, the historian from the Stickley company, will be in town to talk about the history of the company, and to provide valuation of your Arts & Crafts items. I am not sure how much like Antiques Road Show this will be but it should be a good time. The event starts at 6:30 on May 16th and admission is $10 with proceeds helping restoration efforts at Pleasant Home. There will also be a reception following the lecture.
I looked round the Tiny Bungalow to see if there are any pieces worth bringing down. Unfortunately, we have nothing that exciting around here and I doubt the price has escalated on the Stickley pieces we've bought from Toms-Price over the last 10 years. While thinking about this, I did some browsing on the Stickley website. If you haven't been there, you should check it out. They now have a room planning device that lets you realize that your Stickley dream furniture doesn't fit into an 800 square foot bungalow.


Seriously though, it is fun and if you're like me and have nothing better to do with your time (sarcasm), it is a good way to kill an hour or so. I laid out my existing furniture and then furnished the rest of the place completely with Stickley. You can print out the plans and a shopping list so you know what to tell the salesperson at the furniture store. It's fun to dream, right? The only tool they don't have is a pricing option so you can see how much your furnished dream rooms will cost - or better, a financing program to show you how many years it might take to pay off a purchase like that.

They really should have a T-shirt for it

This weekend was the huge Toms-Price Warehouse sale. For those of you that don't live in Chicagoland, Toms-Price is our local purveyor of all things Stickley. In fact, I believe they sell more Stickley furniture than any store in the country.

We've never been to the sale and it was pretty remarkable. We'll have to come again the next time they do it. The furniture, which is usually well beyond our means, was still priced beyond our means but at almost reasonable prices. We have been looking to add chairs to our dining room set and I am always trying to convince my wife that we need this:

Needless to say, the only dining chairs they had were not in our finish or leather color but they were on sale at the bargain-basement price of $250 a chair (usually, they cast about two and a half times that). They also the dream chair (with the ottoman) but unfortunately we did not get the $2500 tax rebate we'd need to afford it.


Our visit to the sale was not in vain but it made me think that they should have t-shirts. You know, like those ones you see in just about every tourist shop. "My mom went to _ _ _ and all I got was this lousy t-shirt". This one could say something like, "I went to the Toms-Price warehouse sale and all I got was this lousy _ _ _". Instead of the dream chair, we came home with this:

It is a "big girl bed" for my daughter. Very Arts & Craftsy, huh? Anyway, I'll have to set it up next weekend when we get the mattresses. It is not even in the same league as the dream chair but it made my daughter ecstatic. I guess this makes me feel just as good as I would if I were lounging in the dream chair. Well, maybe not.


The rest of the weekend was beautiful and I spent a good part of Sunday in the garden. I couldn't help myself, I had to start moving plants around. I moved the lilac to the back corner of the yard and moved another out front. I also shifted around a few other plants to make room for an herb garden. I planted a bunch of marigold seeds I harvested from last years marigolds as well. I also have a landscape plan. I'll try and write about it in the next few days.

The garden is looking pretty good. Though the garlic seems to be going crazy, I am going to try and hold off planting anything else for a few weeks. I also made some more headway on my picture frame. I didn't do shit with it all week but hopefully I can get it sanded and start finishing it this week. Note that since I cleaned the basement and made an actual shop that the woodworking is no longer happening on the carpeted and finished part of the basement.

Getting My Arts and Crafts Fix

When ever I mention my appreciation for arts & crafts to someone, I often get an odd look. I immediately imagine a bubble forming over their head with an image of an animal made out of pipe cleaners, a birdhouse made with Popsicle sticks, or a fabric-painted cartoon sweatshirt. Mmm.. …no.

An odd thing is that I get this confused reaction more from the people I know in Central New York than in any other place where I mention it. Little do most CNYers realize, with Stickley Furniture, Robineau Pottery, and the architectural practice of Ward Wellington Ward, their home was once a cultural center with a great number of individuals focused on the Arts & Crafts movement. In addition to these local purveyors of the movement, many local patrons worked with people from other parts of the country and masterworks from people like John LaFarge, Louis Comfort Tiffany, Frank Lloyd Wright and countless others dot the Upstate NY landscape.

Obviously, the "Arts & Crafts" that I am talking about includes things like mortise and tenon joinery, natural wood, art glass, fine pottery. Since my fellow housebloggers detest this kind of stuff (ha ha), I apologize in advance for boring you with some pics.

Unfortunately, while in Buffalo, we did not get to visit many of my favorite Arts & Crafts landmarks there. I did do my ritualistic drive by all of the Silsbee homes there but that is about it. Incidentally, I am always prepared to drive by and find one torn down. Buffalo might have been a bust but I did have some time to do a bit of sightseeing while visiting Syracuse.
On our way into Syracuse, we stopped in to see the Willard Memorial Chapel. I have known about this place for some time but have not taken the time to see it. This is a perfect place to go touring with a 3 year old! (sarcasm). While I ogled at the art glass, fine lighting fixtures, exquisite tile and stencil work, my daughter danced around the chapel nave singing a song from one of her favorite TV shows. I thought it was hilarious. I am not sure that the other tourists felt the same.Supposedly this is the only intact Tiffany designed chapel. We have also visited the chapel designed for the Worlds Columbian Exposition, parts of which are on display in Winter Park, FL. This one is as nice and in some ways more impressive. It is a remarkable place (understatement) and a must see for anyone driving in the vicinity of Auburn, NY.
We stayed in Syracuse our final weekend of the vacation and on Saturday I took some time to visit the new Stickley museum. Holy crap this place was cool and it really surprised me. While growing up, the old Stickley factory was used as an outlet store for the company. I don’t exactly remember what shape it was in then but it has recently been converted into the Fayetteville Public Library. The second floor of the factory is now home to the Stickley Museum - Incredible!I was told that only about 10% of their collection was on view at the moment. It was great – an exhibit of furniture from 1901 through the present that included highlights like Gustav’s own personal bedroom set and pieces owned by Barbra Streisand. It showed me a lot that I didn’t know about the company and the various designs. Like the chapel, this too is well worth the trip to anyone that is in the area. I didn’t get the overdose of architectural sites I had hoped for but all in all, it was a nice vacation.

Change in Plans

What good are plans if you can’t change them? It is over a month into 2007 and I have made absolutely NO progress on the hall. This is not to say that I have accomplished nothing. I put in a new lighting fixture in the pantry, I replaced a fixture in the basement near my workbench, I added a new light in the main area of the basement, and I have done some more odds and ends in the basement. Unfortunately, the hall - blue tape and all, looks pretty much the way that it did on January 14th.

The change in plans is due to a belated Christmas gift. It’s a long story but I’ll try and abbreviate it to the final two chapters. I was going to buy my wife a Christmas gift but instead of just buying it, I decided to take her shopping with me so that she could choose. O.K., everyone can repeate this in unison, "Chris you are such an idiot". Needless to say, the gift has since changed and I am not buying what I intended to buy. Actually, I should substitute the "I" with “we” in this sentence.

We are buying a bed. We need a bigger bed and our mattresses are almost 20 years old so we are buying a bed. My wife originally saw a bed at Crate & Barrel (or the French pronunciation, "Cratee Barrel" as we prefer) that she liked. It was nice – wood, Arts & Crafts style, but I thought it was a bit pricey. I suggested that we go to look at the Stickley beds and compare prices for “the real thing” as opposed to a “crappy knock-off”. I never thought this would amount to anything (typically my wife is suspect anytime I mention the brand "Stickley") but I’ll do anything to even just window shop at Toms Price.

After the first round of shopping, it was no surprise that we found a bed that we loved – one from the collection of new Pasadena furniture patterned after the Green & Green stuff. What was surprising is that the bed was CHEAPER than the Crate Barrel bed. I’ll repeat that in case you missed it. We found a bed at Toms Price that was cheaper than a bed at Crate Barrel. This may mean nothing to most people but I was pretty shocked.
Our new bed arrives in less than 3 months. This means that I have 3 months to complete renovation of the bedroom. This includes stripping all the wood, removing wallpaper, repairing plaster, etc. Needless to say, this is a much larger project than my hall would have been. With my luck the bed will be very early and we’ll be in the middle of everything. I better get to work.