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January 24, 2005
Our first purchase(s)
Well, we bought our first new bits of furniture today. We went back to Bassett Direct and bought the dresser, nightstands, and chest of drawers from the 5th Avenue collection. I think we got a reasonably good deal on the pieces, and they paid the sales tax. Not a trivial amount of money by any means, but it's cherry wood, well constructed, and pretty much the only bedroom furniture we've seen in lots of looking that we really liked.
The problem is, we hated the bed. So we went to Don Willis furniture to look at a bed made by Borkholder. It was only a couple hundred dollars more than the bed we hated - but that didn't make it much easier to spend that much money on a bed. To make matters worse, they had the dining table that we really liked, and the table with 6 chairs (the ones without arms) was definitely un-cheap. I felt the prices individually were reasonable given that the pieces are hand-crafted, but we hemmed and hawed enough that we managed to negotiate another couple hundred off the combined price, and since we had seen them at the Seattle Home Remodeling show, they gave us the no-sales tax special pricing that had technically ended with the show on Sunday.
No matter how you slice it, we spent a serious amount of money on furniture today - but I think I'm ok with it. We kept some proceeds from the sale of the house in CA back for furnishing and upgrading the new house, and Dawnise and I had decided that we wanted to "up-class" a bit - buying accouterments that fit the house. These definitely qualify. The Borkholder pieces are one-of-a-kind heirloom quality - and we'll have to update our wills to make sure they're explicitly handled (damn it Rob, see what you've done to me?).
Don Willis had an absolutely beautiful curio - also by Borkholder - but I had definitely hit the limit of my comfort zone. But I have to say, my fountain pen collection would look stunning displayed in that case... Perhaps, if it's still there, I'll reconsider once our budget has recovered a bit.
The lead time on the bedroom stuff is 4-6 weeks, and the Borkholder is more like 10, so we'll be living with empty rooms for a while, but that's ok.
Posted by dberger at January 24, 2005 10:05 PM