I like free stuff!

My grandmother is moving and has had to pair down her belongings considerably.  She expressed very strongly that she wanted as many of her things to stay in the family as possible (she seem particularly eager for one of her five boys or her 11 grandchildren to have a twin sized mattress that belonged to her mother - ie: a mattress that would likely have qualified for a senior citizens discount at Denny's about 10 years ago). 

Among the mattress and several coffee makers still in their original packing, I found a few things that I could either use (hello eight-cup Pyrex measure!) or had some sentimental attachment to (a few family photographs).

These are some of the gems I scored:

This floor lamp apparently belonged to my great grandmother.  It's brass and has three candelabra style bulbs at the top along with a central bulb and shade that I removed for transportation / don't particularly care for.   The base of the lamp is really cool.  When I up-ended the lamp to go in my truck I discovered a small orange bulb in the bottom.  Apparently the base lights up and the frosted glass is illuminated too. 

I'm in love with this lamp.  I'm not 100% sure where I want to put it, but I just couldn't leave it behind.  I may put it in my living room and build the entire colour scheme around it.  You can't really see from this picture, but the glaze on the base is a bit textured as well. 

Lamps were apparently de rigueur to me on the day I went to grandmas because I also brought this baby home with me.  I'll probably wind up using this in our master bedroom.  It has one of those convenient foot peddle switches.

This small dresser was also my great grandmother's.  I love the pretty carved pattern on all the drawers.  It's going to need some heavy sanding/stripping and a bit of wood filler here and there, but it's otherwise in good shape.  We ultimately want to remove our front hall closet so I'm thinking that this piece will likely become part of the final styling of the front hall where we would have a bench on one side of the stairs and this dresser on the other to balance things out (not to mention a place for keys, cloth grocery bags and small seasonal ware). 

 

 Last but not least, I picked these two out-door pieces.  The bench obviously needs work but I loved how the iron has some green patina to it.  This is how the pieces look on our front patio:

A little petite looking, actually.  This patio is so large, it's difficult to really imagine what to do with it.  (Also, you can see a birthday balloon still hanging in our front window from the joint party we had for my husband and son this past weekend). 

Once the weather becomes a little more consistently warm we're going to paint the garage doors and shutters (which you can barely see at the top right of the house in this picture) Hale Navy by Benjamin Moore:

Hale Navy

 I want to paint the front door yellow (subject to your comments and critiques of course).

Stuart Gold

I was thinking about painting the bench a couple shades lighter than the front door.  I'll leave the iron as-is and just clean up the wood slats for painting.  

Western Flax

As a reminder, this is what the front of the house sort of looks like (the picture is from the real estate agent who sold the house to us)

  So, what do you think?  Too many shades of colour the front of the house? Give me your input!