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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Decorating with Found Art

After my mother's death I discovered a box in the attic that contained nothing but the four legs of a stool. I was so disgusted, I threw them all in the woodpile. Then, I retrieved this piece to hang on the wall of the breezeway between the garage and the house, as a reminder of what can happen to one when one begins to collect things.

There is a lot of Found Art to be found around the home I've inherited from my parents.

At least I hope you can call it Found Art. Since I'm finding it, that is what I'm calling it. Some might call what I'm finding "architectural antiques." Some might want to be more frank and call it "pieces of old chairs," which I've discovered stored in numerous corners of this abode. Anyway, I'm decorating with it so I can call it Art if I want to.

I don't know what terrible thing happened to my mother when she was young. But someone must have deprived her of a chair or something. Because she developed a sort of an obsession with them, which I know I've mentioned before.

Two of the "chairs" that didn't sell at our garage sale were actually just the backs of two chairs--no front legs or seats. After the sale, I took a hammer to them, (who is the crazy person in this story?) and used them to decorate some blank spaces that had been troubling me on the beams and above the windows in the kitchen.

A carved chair back on the kitchen cross beam in the foreground and a supporting carved chair piece above the window in the background.

My sister thinks these chair pieces look like birds: I think they look like angels, though as such they remind me of no one in my own family.

A closer look at the carved chair back I put up on the cross beam in the kitchen.

Quite a bit of stuff I've found as I've cleaned out this house has been sold, tossed, or donated. But a few weeks ago I retrieved these things from a pile I'd made in the garage. For now I've placed them on the hearth.


The orchid and the Herend and Portmerion cache pots are mine: the other things are Found Art, including; the curved iron pot hangers which I'm thinking of putting up in the beams of the beamed ceiling in the living room; the copper fondue pot that holds the orchid; and the three hand-carved chair rails that once graced a gone-to-seed Mexican chair stored in our backyard shed.

You can tell me if you think this is a good idea or not. I'd love to hear from others who have used Found Art in decorating. For now I can say these positive things about decorating with this junk: if you had parents like mine, you can find it all around you, so you have no shortage of decorating inspirations; your investment in it is zero, so your risk is equally minimal; when that big earthquake comes, as it inevitably will in California, you don't have to worry that this stuff will be damaged when it falls down--it is already damaged beyond repair anyway.

And finally, the best part about it is that when you change your mind and decide it isn't really Art after all, it has a immediate second life: you can always use it for firewood come the winter.

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