Favourite Things Friday

Welcome to Favourite Things Friday. I wanted to thank everyone who linked up last week and shared their favourite things. There were some fantastic favourites!

So here's the deal. You write a post about one of your favourite things and then link to this post with the linky at the bottom,  so everyone who is participating can come and have a sticky beak at your favourite thing.  Easy! And you can share anything you like. You're a creative bunch and I'm looking forward to seeing this weeks posts.

My Father In Law is a building supervisor/project manager.Years ago, Mr. P's Dad was asked to remove an old dresser from a building site and dump it. At the time Mr. P had a typical boy house with no furniture so FIL brought the dresser home to Mr. P who was house sharing with a mate at the time, and said mate took the dresser  for storage in his bedroom.

When I moved in with Mr. P the mate moved out , and left the dresser. Mr. P happened to mention that he was going to offer it to his mate for 50 bucks. I asked Mr. P to show it to me because I thought we might be able to use it in our shed. ( truthfully I  was hoping it would be marginally better  than the 1950's veneer dresser he had in our bedroom which I still get the chills thinking about , and for some reason that continues to defy belief he was actually very attached to )  This is what he showed me.

Isn't it pretty? It has handmade dovetail joints, and I've never stripped it and rubbed it back, because it oozes awesome just the way it is even down to  the burn mark on the edge. 

Since I love old furniture that oozes awesome,  I told Mr. P that I wanted to put it in our bedroom.  It seemed better to me at the time to use the  wood dresser in the hope that Mr. P would see we couldn't possibly fit  2 dressers in our room  and I could shuffle the veneer monstrosity out to the junk pile without hurting his feelings. Mission accomplished. By the way I did a lot of that round here when I moved in. Slowly  and tactfully.

About 6 months later we were driving past an upmarket antique store when we saw a similar dresser in the window. Since we had no idea how old ours was , we stopped for a look, in the hope it was similar enough for us to get a date.  It was exactly the same down to the locks and handles. It's a cedar chest made in 1880. And it's worth $3500.00. That's approximately one bajillion US dollars.  Mr. P was pretty darn glad at that point he hadn't offered it to the mate for 50 bucks. And I got to pat myself on the back for having such fabulous taste and a keen eye for quality.

Since then, our entire bedroom has been built around  this antique 130 year old dresser, including our built in wardrobes. I often wonder how many people have had their things in the same drawers I'm using now and how much history this dresser has seen. Yep-I'm a romantic at heart.  

And I still love that dresser  as much as I did when I first clapped eyes on it almost a decade ago. And it's not about it's worth because it's not for sale.  Which means unlike the rest of the house our bedroom is never likely to be re-done in white.

Thanks for visiting. I can't wait to see your Favourite Things!