She's Thrifty

Updates:

1) Apparently all the shower needed was to be publicly shamed, because we are now getting hot-ish water regularly.

2) Food I forgot to mention from Leigh's visit: mini-cannolis, mini- key lime and chocolate tarts, caramel popcorn, chocolate truffles, garlicky green olives, gruyere, ciabatta bread, and artichoke tapenade. Nom.

All right, let's talk about that couch up there. How fierce is that thing? It's $100 at Boomerangs in West Roxbury if you're in the market for a swoopy, red-velvet bit-o-awesome. Although yesterday was half-price furniture day, so I make no guarantees for it still being there.

Since moving to Boston's faux-burbs in July, all of my "splurge" purchases have come from Boomerangs, which is a thrift store that benefits the AIDS Action Committee. Yeah, that's right: my idea of treating myself is a $6 pair of secondhand shoes. I've got a toddler, a mortgage, a car loan, and an unsteady income, meaning some weeks even TJ Maxx is too rich for my blood.

I'm not complaining, especially when these are the shoes:



They're J Crew and the interwebs tell me they retail for around $200. Granted, they're not exactly my size, but for $6, who cares? (The crock pot in the background is mine. It's not old, it's vintage, okay?)

Of course, the thing about thrift shops is that you can't go in looking for something, because their stock is unpredictable and ever changing. But I had so many things that I needed when we moved that I think I came home with something nearly every time I visited for the first three months or so. (I had a home with more than three rooms to decorate for the first time in my life, and I'd finally admitted to myself that buying clothes that fit was not going to doom me to staying my post-pregnancy weight for the rest of my life.)

Right now I'm on the lookout for furniture, which is the trickiest because if you see something you like, you really have to buy it immediately. I wanted an arm chair and a pair of end tables I saw on a Friday evening, and by the time I came back with my car on Saturday afternoon, both were gone. The feeling that you've gotten a great deal that no one else is going to get is the absolute best part of secondhand shopping, but missing out on a unique find is probably the worst.

Some people don't like thrift shops because they don't like going through stuff that used to belong to other people. I don't get this at all. I admit that I may have a bit of a skewed perspective, though, given that when I was a small child, my dad would take me dump picking. It's exactly what it sounds like: back in the day, before dumps became landfills, we'd spend the occasional Saturday afternoon picking through the pile of salvageable stuff and fending off territorial sea gulls. (Lest you think my dad was a hobo or a hoarder, this was a common enough practice where I grew up that one of the landfills built a shed to house people's reusable items and dubbed it the dumptique. Really.)

My mother, too, is a master of turning the old into new. Our house was built on another old dumping ground, and as they were digging the foundation, Mom picked some old glass bottles out of the dirt, washed them off and put them around the kitchen. She cracks up when people ask where she got such lovely antiques. (I also didn't realize until I started studying Victorian history in high school that our napkins were stored in a salvaged chamber pot. My mom really can decorate with anything.)

Mom, of course, adores Boomerangs and was gutted that I didn't get the arm chair. I told her it was fine, something else cute and cheap is bound to appear sooner or later, and this time I'll be ready to pounce.