Phase 3

As I've mentioned before, after sitting for almost 20 years, all of Dawn's grandparents' furniture was nearly ruined by the heavy summer rains of 2004. The Restoration Clinic, in Mechanicsburg, agreed to take it to their shop, but they couldn't do it the week we were in town, so we basically gave them a key to the mansion and told them to send us a bill.

We aren't normally that trusting, but what could we do? We couldn't stay an extra week, we couldn't leave the furniture until we came back, and we couldn't find someone else on such short notice. We were expecting them to take the chandeliers, the dining room set, and some of the upholstered chairs. Instead they brought a tractor-trailer and cleaned the place out.

But they took pictures and carefully catalogued everything. As Dawn and I went through the 200+ photos, we kept saying, "is that ours?" There was a green jelly cabinet from the attic that we had no memory of. There were old paintings that we'd never seen. There were crystal table lamps and mahogany dressers and upholstered chairs that apparently had just been background noise to us. Someone could have stolen all of this wonderful stuff, and we would have never noticed!

They gave us estimates for restoring each piece, and then we grouped everything -- "phase 1" we needed for the B&B, phase 2 we wanted restored but wasn't critical, and phase 3 were things we didn't want at all. (Phase 3 consisted of one thing: a massive empire chest that didn't go with anything, and which was in pretty bad shape. Dawn called several antique dealers and they didn't want it, either.)

Phase 1 came back a month ago--just before the grand opening--and phase 2 turned out to be very small (most of the items had somehow migrated to phase 1), so it didn't make sense to keep paying rent on the trailer for the phase 3 items. So last week Dawn and I rented a larger storage unit and a 26-foot U-haul truck. (Had I been driving, I'm sure this journal entry would be much more interesting, but Dawn took the wheel and the trip was uneventful.)

So now our storage unit is filled with stuff like an old vacuum-tube stereo, a rocking horse on springs, a pink upholstered "slipper" rocking chair, and a cast-iron pot-belly stove. Dawn spent several days moving boxes from our small storage unit into the larger one, and although she didn't find the rest of her grandmother's silver set yet, she did find her double-headed mink stoll in the bottom of a hat box. (If she asks, I didn't put it there.)

It's ironic that we have a 120-acre farm with a 200-foot barn, and we need to rent a storage unit.