More Found Art at Fort Chapman

After our garage sale a few months ago, I was looking up in the rafters of the garage and saw something quite remarkable. I called my sister. "It looks like there is a four-poster bed up there in the eaves. Do you have any idea where that came from?" I asked her.

She said she thought our mother had cut down the posts on several other beds and what I was looking at was the residue.

I couldn't stand not to know so I had my friend and neighbor Mickey climb up on my ladder and hand all the pieces down to me. It was not residue after all. It was a lovely four-poster in cherry or walnut (I'm guessing), stained a nice rich mahogany. Just in time for me to use it in the bedroom I'm re-doing!



Living on Echo Drive is like having a furniture and knickknack store at one's disposal at all times. My cup overfloweth.

Where the heck this bed came from I can only speculate. At one point in my youth my mother bought an old set of furniture from a neighbor up the street and used some of it in the room my sister and I shared. Did it include this bed, and was this bed up in the eaves for half a century? We will never know. But it is a lovely find and I intend to use it in the guest room, now to be dubbed the Four Poster Room.

I have also finally found a color I am going to use on the walls of the room--a Behr Paint color called French Castle (more about the French later in this report!), that is a taupey/grayish/pinkish putty color. With spiffy white glossy woodwork it will look ab fab.

I used a similar color to this one in the living room of my cottage in Winter Park, Florida and called it British Khaki. Add fabrics of white damask, soft pink and bright raspberry to the room--with a dash of green--and it creates a look that is warm and serene, just the way I like things.

I have used the term "found art" a lot on this blog because I have found so much stuff in the caverns of this home and have used pieces of it here and there as "art." You remember the chair pieces I used on the cross beams of the kitchen, don't you?

These were part of two chair backs I found in the garage that had no seat or legs. So I took a hammer to them and put the carvings up in the kitchen. They are just the kind of quirky things that remind me of Mom.

I realize now that I have been using a slightly wrong term for these things. I was watching a program on African Art this week and the expert mentioned that the painter had used object trouvé in his work. That's French for "found art" and as you know, the best terms for everything are all disguised in French. So, object trouvé is what we have a lot of here at my house.

And I trouvéd even more of it up there in the eaves!

That's me photographing my latest object trouvé aka a mirror. I propped it against the car because it appears the mirror has gone milky and I'll need to transport it to a glass place and have a new mirror put in the lovely frame.

Up there with the four-poster, covered with a filthy, dusty plastic tarp, was this old mirror. It came attached to a swivel that one is supposed to then attach to a dresser, but I unscrewed it from that because that isn't a look I like (too faux Victorian) (faux being the French word for "false" by the by, and you have to say faux, when referring to art or style, or no one will know what you mean, as "false" sounds just too too much like you got it wrong by accident.) Once I get the glass replaced, I'm going to hang it on the wall of the Four Poster Room. I especially love the carved bow at the top of the frame.



I wish I could tell you I had reached the bottom of the object trouvé mine shaft at this house, but I have to say there is still a lot more stuff here and there that I have not yet gotten to. My father's only curse words were said when he was periodically required to climb a ladder and store this stuff out of sight against the day these things might be needed. That day has finally arrived, Dad! And all that stuff you stored for Mom? Some of it is absolutely junque, it is true. But the stuff that isn't, I am using, because it has a certain je ne sais quoi and thus, fits in perfectly with the rest of the I-don't-know-what I'm using in decorating your old and wonderful home, which will forever remind me of you.

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