Roadside Retro

Lately I have been cruising Ebay in the hope of finding some retro furniture inspiration.  Danish design dining chairs and a telephone table were my main inspiration points.  A retro telephone table screams VINTAGE!! The need for a telephone table would have arisen from having to sit next to the phone which was plugged into the wall. Remember those? I do and my grandma still has one.  The worst thing about portable phones (especially in a house as ramshackle as ours) is that they get lost which leads to the mad dash around the house as the phone is ringing just to find 1 of 4 handsets!

I had spied a few telephone tables which took my fancy, one in Sydney which was selling for $200, a little above my budget.  My budget was a combination of reasonableness, but also the fact that my hubby thought that it was a completely useless item and why on earth would I want such a piece of junk in our new house?  (I have a feeling that there will be many more statements like this as I try to decorate the new house).  I happened across another table which was more of a hall table, very cute with spoky retro legs, metal feet and a black glass top.  I marked it so that I could see how much it ended up selling for.

Around three days later I was driving home one afternoon and came across an item of someone's lawn which had been put out for someone to take for free.  There were four spoky legs, four metal feet and a black glass top! By jove it was identical to the one on eBay! Yippee I thought!! Roadside retro!  I drove around the block and then stopped again to pick it up.  It was one of those sheepish moments where you hope that it definitely had been put out to be taken for free and that a random stranger wasn't just about to run out and say that it was just on the front lawn because they were dusting.  No random stranger appeared and I shoved it into my car and headed for home.

With great glee I brought my roadside retro table inside for a closer inspection.  The wood was in pretty good nic and in the shadows of my house you couldn't see the scratches in the glass.  Alas, in the sunshine entering new house they may be quite visible and it is probably why it was out in the street.  Hubby returned home later that night, came in the front door and said at the top of his voice 'What the heck is that!!! Where have you been collecting junk!?!?'

My response - 'I didn't pay for it so no whinging allowed, it's roadside retro!'

Roadside Retro Table