Who else loves to 'play around' in your home?

What a title for this blog! What else to you call it when you move around your antiques to make new little settings in your home? There are times when it is hot outside or it's raining - actually pouring down rain for a couple of days - and you just don't feel like cleaning or baking, right? So...what to do, what to do? I think it is so much fun to rearrange your rooms for a brand new look! I am so very lucky that we have not only antique accessories but we have many pieces of antique furniture in our collections so I can play around all day! Last week as I was getting ready for my June Update and was taking pictures of the antiques that I was adding to my website this month, I looked around my great room and thought it looked boring with everything in 'its place' so I decided to move things around. Now, I have three tables in my great room so when I host family dinners at the holidays we can all sit around antique tables and still all be together. I have to add that there are about 25 family members that usually come to these dinners so sitting around one table just doesn't work for us. I used to use three long 'catering' tables that you can buy at Big Box stores for these dinners and I would position them in a horseshoe so we could all eat at the same table. The amount of jockeying by family members to sit in certain seats around that table was crazy! So I had to do something and using three early tables - one sawbuck, one dropleaf, and one scrubtop table became my tables for the family dinners. When they were not being used for dinners, I would just push the two smallest ones against walls in the room. But! last week I decided to move things around and create some little vignettes and here are some of the results...

I thought that I would make this scrub top table into a working food prep table for my hearth and added some antique rye baskets (available in my June 2015 Update), covered with tea-stained cheesecloth, to the table along with an early 18th century covered tankard that may have held water or beer. That looked OK so I added some potatoes to one of the baskets...

That was OK for a while and I liked what I saw but then we found - and bought - this gorgeous circa 1800 Hepplewhite fall front desk that you see below on a antiquing trip to Lancaster County, PA. Problem was... we actually were looking for a short but wide corner cupboard for our family room that I have been working on since this past spring. We went to a great antique shop called the Old Mill Antique Store in Strasburg, PA to see if they had a corner cupboard we could buy. We found our corner cupboard (it is fabulous!) but then we were walking around waiting for the owner to finish with a customer and I spied what I thought might be a Sheraton fall front desk.... Right about that time, the owner came back and measured the corner cupboard. I was ecstatic! It would fit but we wanted to go home and double check our measurements. Long story short! It was a Hepplewhite desk and yep! you guessed it! We bought it too... When we finally got the desk home after waiting a week for hubby to have a day off work and then renting a U-Haul van to go up and get both pieces of furniture, I had to move furniture and change things around in my living room so we could get that fall front desk in a place of honor. I then added some someof my early pewter to the top and well...I LOVE that fall front desk!

With moving things around came the need to do something with a couple of antique chairs that were sitting in the living room. We had just added those chairs to the other furniture in the great room until this last week when I was bored again...taking pictures and working on pricing is not as fun as finding the antiques.... so I decided to change up the great room again and well...

Here is my early Hepplewhite drop leaf table set for dinner, possibly in an early tavern. The two chairs look great in this vignette so I used this picture to show off that circa 1820 redware charger in my update this month and it sold immediately! Since it is sold, I may add another little pewter plate to the table. Before I sign off, I have to show you the progress on my family room. More on it later but suffice to say - bright wall colors were used in colonial times to bring in the sunlight and brighten a room. You can see my antique corner cupboard and also the 18th century blue painted blanket chest on the right side of the picture and yes...that is my hubby's 60" TV over the blanket chest. LOL! As you can tell, the room is not finished. It needs crown molding and more things on the walls - and and more antiques in the corner cupboard since those blue painted grain measures are now sold but at least I am getting started! That's all for now but I will be back soon with more ramblings and fun stuff!