Scavenging // From Curb to Craigslist

One evening, several months back, I found myself hauling away my neighbor's garbage. I worked quickly, hoping nobody would notice as I dragged a dining table and two chairs across the street to my garage. They weren't pieces I thought I'd use in my own home, but it was hard to resist the torn and dangling piece of cardboard with the word scribbled "Free" across the front of it.

I had ideas, lots of them.

With her recently expanded family, I felt that free table could easily be updated with a little paint and serve my sister well. I speed dialed, figuring if she didn't want it that I could just as easily drag it back across the street so someone else could score. Happily, she and her husband made plans to pick it up the next week.

Then there were the two chairs. The plan all along was to spruce them up with bright, pinky-red paint and some floral fabric. You see, we're slowly making progress on the bedroom my nieces share and I envisioned these as multi-functional seating for that space, convenient for dressing and easily pulled up to a desk for art and schoolwork activities. But one day, as I was cleaning up our garage for the 100th time since moving in, it occurred to me that these dining chairs, that had now sat for weeks collecting dust in my garage, were going to be too big and heavy for my little nieces to use.

So the plan changed. A little white paint already bought during renovations and some old remnant fabric I had laying around and voila!, a new Craiglist listing was born.