BARGAIN HUNTING

-Finding deals, insisting on quality-

“JUST BUY IT,” SAID MY OLDEST daughter, who thinks my purse taps directly into Bill Gate’s bank account.

“Not at that price,” I snorted.

She rolled her eyes. Boy, did that feel familiar.

We were browsing through a nearby furniture boutique, and I had found a sink vanity I liked. I love the look of those old-fashioned chests with the sink cut in the top. But I don’t always like the price. This one was a good antique reproduction; I had seen its likes in catalogs. It had a carved wood cabinet, claw feet, and a black marble top with an aged brass sink and faucet. It would glam up my powder room nicely, but it cost twice as much as I thought it should, which was why I was scoffing, and my daughter was embarrassed.

I flashed back to when I was a girl. My mother used to mortify me whenever she acted frugal, which was often. She was born in Scotland, so she came by this trait genetically.

“Forty dollars for an all-cotton blouse!” she’d exclaim in a voice that would turn my hair into porcupine quills. “It’s not worth two!” She thought nothing of saying to a store clerk, loud enough for everyone around to hear: “What a ridiculous price! I can’t believe the markup. I bet you only paid half that.” You would find me outside hiding in the hedges.

When she hauled me out, I’d plead, “Mom, don’t be so embarrassing.”

“Embarrassing! They should be the ones embarrassed, charging those prices.”

While Mom did teach me to question both price values and people’s values, I also learned that how much something is worth isn’t what matters. What matters is how much people will pay. A world of difference often lies between the two. Witness those $248 torn-up jeans at Nordstrom. “You’re kidding, right?” I hold up a pair of the holey jeans and challenge the unsuspecting Nordstrom clerk, as my daughter does a half-gainer into the nearby clothing rounder.

But back to the furniture store. A few months later, my daughter and I visited again. The vanity was marked down 30 percent. We were getting somewhere.

“See,” I told her. “It pays to wait.”

“So get it already,” she said, “then let’s go.” She wasn’t so eager to see the powder room furnished as she was to get me out of the store before I humiliated her.

“Watch this,” I said as the owner approached. She asked if she could help us.

“Not today,” I said. “But if you ever mark this down 50 percent, call me. I’ll buy it.”

I looked around for my daughter. Poof! She’d vaporized like a genie, as if I’d mentioned chores.

The gracious owner took my name.

I found my daughter crouched behind the ceramics: “Mom, you’re so embarrassing.”

Several weeks later, the gracious owner called. The chest was now 40 percent off. Tempting, but 50 percent off was still my price. Then I hopped online and found the same chest on Horchow. It was $500 more and didn’t have a faucet. The faucet cost an additional $430, and shipping was $115. Suddenly, 40 percent off with no shipping or wait time appealed.

I panicked. “What if someone buys it?” I worried out loud.

“No one’s going to buy it,” Dan said from behind the sports section. Dan can’t believe anyone actually buys furniture, since that’s the last thing he’d ever do.

“How do you know?”

“Because it’s been sitting there for six months.”

“But not at this price.”

I called the gracious owner back and asked whether paying cash would make any difference. She paused, then said she could take another 5 percent off. In a victory for cheapskates, I had my car in front of her store faster than you could say “It never hurts to ask.”

Sometimes the best finds are from used furniture sources. Consignment stores and Craigslist are two of my favorites.

NOT THE CONFINEMENT STORE

Going furniture shopping with my husband is like going underwater diving without oxygen. He withholds the essential ingredient. “It takes money, honey,” I’ve told Dan more than a few times.

“Not if you just look.”

“What’s the point of looking if you can’t buy?”

“Then you’ll know what you want when you can buy.”

“And just when would that be? When the kids are out of braces and the college fund is full and the cars are paid off and I’m in a rest home where the furniture is provided?!”

“Something like that,” he says.

“Argh!!”

But I’ve learned, the one way to get this man to budge his billfold is to say the three magic words: It’s a deal.

Which is how I’ve come to love consignment stores. These are stores where people who are downsizing, divorcing, or tired of their furnishings – and really do have the money to decorate – bring their gently used stuff to sell. Inventory also comes from model homes that have closed and from overstocked or closing furniture stores. The consignment store sets the price and typically splits the proceeds with the original owner, who generally feels that this option beats donating the item, dumping it, or giving it to their ungrateful children.

“It’s a glorified garage sale,” Dan said the first time I dragged him to a consignment store.

Granted, these stores don’t have the cachet of stylized furniture showrooms, and some of the stuff I wouldn’t let my dogs sit on. But you can find some great bargains among the riff-raff if you know what to look for – and you don’t have impatient family members along.

“Not the confinement store!” my kids wail when they sense the car veering toward one.

They dislike furniture shopping even more than my husband does. In fact, sometimes, when my sadistic streak flares and we’re on our way somewhere they find fun, like a water park, I’ll say, “but first I want to stop at this consignment store.”

“Nooooo!” they protest.

“Just kidding,” I say, smiling.

Other times, when I do drag them along, I promise I’ll be quick and will buy smoothies all around when we’re done. This paid off last time. I scored a great dark brown leather ottoman with brass nail heads for the loft. It had come off the showroom floor of Woodley’s, a well-regarded maker of leather furniture, so it was practically new. I knew it had retailed for over $400, and it was only $195. I smuggled it home, hoping Dan would think it had been in our home all along, and that the kids, bribed with the smoothies, would consider it too boring to mention. If Dan ever does notice, I’ll tell him the truth: It was a great deal, plus we got miles.

BUYING FURNITURE ON CRAIGSLIST

-The Pain and the Glory-

We had come to a standstill. Well, one of us wasn’t standing. He’d fallen over. In an odd bonding moment, four of us – Dan; Tom, the guy we’d bought the secondhand desk from; me, superfluous bystander; and The Desk were stuck together like a blood clot in our basement stairwell. On the uphill end of the desk, Tom was holding up his end of the bargain – literally. As part of the sale, Tom had agreed, probably to his regret, to help Dan move the desk from our truck to the basement. As they lugged the monster downstairs, Dan slipped on the nylon sleeping bag that someone – that superfluous bystander! – had put down to protect the wood stairs. (Forget the people, don’t nick the stairs!) The desk was now on Dan. I pictured my husband, flattened like Wile E. Coyote at the bottom of a cliff beneath a boulder. I’d killed him!

A faint cry came from what sounded like the desk’s file drawer: “I could use a hand here.” I came to my senses and slid sideways between the stairwell wall and the desk, and hoisted the desk off Dan’s leg. The rest of him was lying headfirst downstairs. He got up, brushed himself off with his remaining dignity, picked the desk up again, and limped onward with Tom into his office. All because this was a deal.

Let me rewind. When not traveling, Dan works in his home office in the basement, which is newly finished, but, until now, unfurnished. My office is one floor up. Lately, when I would venture down to his office looking for a lunch date, I’d notice that he wasn’t working, but shopping on Craigslist for used office furniture.

“Hard at work, I see,” I’d joke.

“I’m working on working,” he’d defend. “I can’t get anything done until I get some furniture.” He was working on three folding tables, smothered in computer equipment, cords, and mountains of paper. Because I’m a fan of neatness, productivity, and shopping, I helped him browse.

As usual, we had different furniture agendas. He wanted a U-shaped desk, with lots of cabinetry, for under $1,000. I wanted a traditional, Old World-style desk to go with the room’s coffered ceiling. He was shopping Craigslist, because you can zero in on local sellers. Craigslist is the world’s biggest online virtual garage sale. I was leery, but Dan insisted it was a great way to buy furniture.

Postings ranged from hideous to hilarious and showed that more people should take photo classes. Weeks passed. We found a desk we liked, but it sold in three hours. We resolved to pull the trigger faster next time. Then a desk that seemed perfect appeared: cherry, U-shaped, with a hutch, excellent condition, for $1,000, and it was just twenty minutes away. A quick online search revealed that the same desk new would have cost $3,000. We were there within the hour. After a brief negotiation, Tom lowered the price to $850 and threw in the black leather office chair. Score!

Because we wanted a record of the business expense, we wanted to pay with a check. Tom, understandably, wanted cash. So we agreed to drive him to our bank, where he could cash our check, and, since we’d be near our house – how convenient! – he could help us unload. He looked as if he could move the desk alone with his jaws. This is how the four of us got into the stairwell jam.

That night I surveyed Dan’s injuries: cuts on his elbow, two goose-egg bruises on his leg, and a welt on his back the size of a crow’s wing. “Are you sure this was worth it?” I asked.

“Absolutely,” he said.

CATALOG VICTIM

I come down the stairs in what I think is a pretty cute new sweat suit. My unsuspecting family is gathered around the breakfast table, which is what they do when they hope something to eat will magically appear on it. I’m hoping they’ll notice the outfit, say something along the lines of: “You look nice. Is that new?”

“Where did you get that?” my husband asks.

“From a catalog,” I say, twirling so all can admire.

“You paid money for that?”

I look down at the gray pants and matching jacket and reconsider.

“Lupe has an outfit just like that,” my youngest daughter adds sweetly. Lupe is our dear, lovely housekeeper, who happens to be a grandmother. “Older housekeeper” wasn’t the look I was going for.

“Maybe she’d like another one,” Dan adds.

“It looked cute in the catalog,” I say, feeling deflated. Then I get an unpleasant deja vu feeling. How many times have I been hoodwinked by seductive catalog portrayals of fashion or furnishing only to be sorely dissapponted when the items arrived? And when will I stop falling for this trick?

Before the sweat-suit mistake, it was the mirrors. I’d ordered two, one for over each sink in the master bath. When we were building this home, I told the builder not to install the flat plate production mirrors because I wanted to find my own. Along the way, I’ve learned two facts about bathroom mirrors:

1. An easy way to make a bathroom look more personal and custom is to replace production mirrors with handsomely framed ones.

2. If a functional mirror is over the sink, my husband won’t see the need to replace it. So it’s best to do without until i find the mirror I want.

We went mirrorless for months while I shopped. Unfortunately, the mirrors I finally picked were poor reflections of their catalog-stylized selves. Plus, they fought with the fixtures. They were too small. Their frames were too thin, the detailing too decorative. They just looked scrappy.

“They’re fine,” Dan said, grateful I’d finally put up something he could shave in.

“I blew it,” I said.

“How could you blow something you spent three months shopping for?”

“They looked great in the catalog! Those catalog companies conspire to defraud people like me all the time,” I huffed. Dan rolled his eyes in the all-wrong mirrors.

I can still see that beautiful mirror in the catalog picture, hung artfully among other items that were in proportion, were the right motif, and didn’t compete: an antique buffet, slender side lamps, and crimson wallpaper. I think back to the sweat suit model, six feet tall and waiflike. She’d look great wearing a potato sack. What was I thinking? I can’t pull off a gray sweat suit no matter how fashionable my shoes and earrings are. On me gray sweats just look dowdy. And my bathroom, I now see, is not the place for delicate, gilded mirrors. Unfortunately, as with the sweat suit, in a fit of optimism I’d thrown away the packaging, so there was no easy way to return these blunders.

The mirrors are in the garage with my growing collection of catalog casualties – that too-fake ficus! That too-small table! And Lupe has herself a new sweat suit.

QUALITY IS WORTH THE WAIT

Regardless of whether you’re buying a dining room table, a bed, or a chair, or whether the piece you’re purchasing is new or gently used, take a lesson from the French: Buy furniture as if it were going to be an heirloom. Sometimes that takes patience, and delay of gratification, as Dan and I learned recently when pool-table shopping.

We were in this pool-table store getting that uneasy feeling you get before you make a big purchase. Now that we had a home with a basement – currently finished but not furnished – Dan was jonesing for a pool table. He’d been going around the house playing air pool all week, shooting phantom cues.

We’d been to three billiard stores and seen tables ranging from $1,500 to $10,000. Though all tables have six pockets and do the job, they differ in expensive ways. Some are made of high-end mahogany, others from veneer-covered particleboard or vinyl. Some have rail sights made from inlaid mother of pearl, others use pressed-on mother of plastic. Dan had decided on a lower-priced table, on special, and had moved on to selecting pool cues. He was also planning a neighborhood billiard party for Saturday.

“Way, way, wait a minute,” I said. “Not so fast.” I’d gloomed onto the store’s interactive video game of “Build Your Own Table” and found many features I liked – and that of course doubled the price.

Dan sighed and found a place to sit.

A salesman hovered nearby but wisely kept his mouth shut. Who needs a salesperson when you have me?

“So, basically,” said Dan, “we either get the table that’s perfectly fine and on sale, or pay more than is comfortable and get a fancier table with features that won’t make any difference when you’re sinking a billiard ball into the corner pocket.”

“When we’re old, feeble, or gone, our kids are going to get stuck with this pool table. If we buy a cheap one, they’ll have to sell it in a garage sale with the rest of our cheap stuff, or keep it as a reminder of how tacky we were. A nice one will become an heirloom, and our grandchildren will play on it and our grandchildren’s children.”

“How did a trip to pick a pool table turn into a discussion about our children’s inheritance – or lack of it?”

“That’s not how the French think.”

“What do the French have to do with this?”

“Betty Lou says.”

“Who’s Betty Lou?”

“She wrote all those gorgeous French design books: The French Connection, Unmistakably French….. and she says the French are patient and buy quality furniture that will become heirlooms.”

“So because of the French we’re not getting a pool table?”

“Yet.”

I will continue this blog with a new chapter on Wednesday, May 14th.2008. “The Finishing Touch.” I will talk about “Home Accessories are like Dessert.”