Oh, what might have been!

Flo and I have been working of late to make my place our place, to give her more of her own space in the apartment I've resided in for eighteen years or so and to make it feel more like home for her.

(We should have undertaken this more seriously months ago, but her gentle hints didn't penetrate my thick head until very recently.)

Job One is to get rid of much of the detritus and flotsam I've accumulated over the years. I don't find this a particularly difficult task. I tend to be something of a hoarder, but when the time comes to clear things out a bit, I don't get too terribly sentimental.

Dozens of books have already made their way out the door (and, in many cases, onto the shelves of the Strand bookstore), and I've set aside some clothes to be either sold on eBay or donated (I'd prefer to do the former, but it's kind of tedious and time-consuming to be a seller on eBay, so I may give in to the impulse to donate them to the Salvation Army).

Yesterday, I cleared out a cabinet that sits just beside our sofa and serves as the telephone table. I uncovered some amazing finds there I’d forgotten I owned, among them several promotional items from the 1939 World's Fair (including an official guidebook), a map of the NYC subway system, circa. (I think) the 1940s, that we intended to get dry-mounted and framed, and – this was Flo’s favorite – a vintage Melodica.

All those items are keepers, naturally, but I found many more stashed away in that little-used cabinet that can go.

We've also talked about eventually, if not right away, replacing some of the furniture I've been using for years. Most of the items were found on the street years ago, and after dragging them upstairs and giving them a coat of paint, I've gotten a dozen years or more of use out of them.

But the time comes when you'd like to upgrade just a smidge.

Longtime B&Y readers and personal friends all know that I have a fondness for things vintage, and my leanings when it comes to furniture don't break that pattern. I love Art Deco stuff from the 1930s and the Space Age style of the late 1950s and early '60s, but I would most like to slowly acquire pieces from the mid-to-late 1940s into the early '50s.

I poked around a bit on eBay over the past couple of days and found a gorgeous Heywood Wakefield chest that made my heart go pit-a-pat. We decided to place a what-the-heck bid of six hundred bucks, figuring it would garner much more than that.

Well, I'm sorry to report that it did, in fact, go for more than we bid, but it further chagrins me to admit that it wasn't very much more.

The winning bidder topped us by just ten bucks, in fact, and I've been kicking myself about that all day long. Of course, that's the way of eBay. If you're one of the top bidders on a given item, you're generally going to feel as if you just missed out on winning, but the truth is, the winning bidder could have entered a top bid of twice what I was willing to spend, and I wouldn't know it. All the system does is top his primary competition (me, in this instance) by the minimal amount, so there's no way for me to know just how much I might've had to bid to win the darned thing.

If I'd have bid $700, his bid might automatically have gone up to $710; if I topped out at $1000, his bid might have auto-jumped to $1100. There's simply no way of knowing, except, perhaps, by emailing the winning bidder and asking what his top bid was. That could serve to assuage my disappointment a bit, if he were to tell me that he'd entered a top bid of, say, $1500, an amount I could never have justified spending.

Oh well, it's better to have loved and lost, as they say. But it hurts a little more to lose by just ten lousy bucks.

Posted by brett at 04:23 PM | TrackBack