New Chairs!
Thanksgiving is next week. We have friends coming all the way from Philly to visit us for the occasion and prepare a huge feast. We did not have dining room chairs, which would have presented, er, logistical problems.
I was convinced that given how ridiculously expensive things are here, we wouldn't be able to find anything we liked within our budget. I mean, Ikea wants £76 for this soul-less chair, for God's sake, so I was sure that anything old and rustic would cost 10 times more.
So you can imagine my glee that for just slightly more than £76 each, we were able to find 6 lovely chairs in Petworth, an old market town about an hour from here. 
There are 4 Oxford windsor chairs, made in the 1840s in the High Wycombe area of Buckinghamshire, and they bear the maker's mark, which is so touching.
Then there are 2 Thames Valley windsor chairs, which are equally lovely. There is a knot on the seat of one that has fallen out, so it has a charming hole.
3 comments:
they ARE lovely... but 76£ ! Definitely a quite expensive place to live... Even for swiss standards... But then again, I haven't bought any chairs with pedigree ;-). I bet they are also quite expensive around these parts. Oh, but the IKEA one, is an armed robbery!
Well, about a year ago we made a rule in our house that nothing is purchased that we don't intend to have when we are elderly. It has been hard to abide by, since the world is filled with cheaply made crap that may seem like a bargain at first but then breaks or wears out in a year or two. I am easily taken in--love for the 99 cent store is one of my dirty little secrets. The trade off is that we buy fewer things, but everything is well made and will last. We have gone 6 months without an alarm clock because we can't find one that is well made and not plastic-ugly. I figure with the going rate for a chair being what it is, I'd much rather have something made with love.
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