Really Shabby Chic

I don't what it is about distressed items - clothing, furniture, art, whatever - that I find so ridiculously sexy. I mean, don't get me wrong, I love IKEA as much as the next college student looking to furnish their overly-priced apartment, but my favorite part of decorating is adding in little touches of vintage, damaged, distressed - whatever you want to call it - chic. Take this picture I found on Etsy (which I have been meaning to purchase, actually).

When I first saw this picture I seriously just started at it for like five minutes. There is something incredible beautiful about the image that's hard to ignore. And to top it all off, the piece is entitled Waiting for Love; now I'll admit this took me a couple seconds to get, but it's perfect isn't it? These old, beat up, broken down and dusty chairs are waiting for love, to get fixed up. Aren't we all...

And then there is this photograph by an artist named David Hamilton that my mom had folded up in her hope chest for as long as I can remember, called Les Baigneuses. My mom said it was "from her hippie days", which made me want it even more, but I figured that since it was in her hope chest that she held it so dear to her heart she would never entrust it to me. So after doing my fair share of Google-ing, I not only found that there is no online version of this photo, but that it is ridiculously expensive to even purchase prints of this guy's work, like 200 pounds expensive! So what do I do? I ask my mom for the photo, which she was of course happy to hand over so I could display it in my living room. Anyways, I think what I like the most about it is that it's kind of beat up. As I said my mom had it folded up and stuffed in a chest for 25 years, so a little wear and tear was bound to happen. But the fact that you can see the fold lines, and there are a couple of tears in the paper only add to its charm. And now that I have this, it has become one of my most favorite possessions. I just hope my mom doesn't decide she wants it back any time soon.

The other highly prized item in my apartment is my headboard. I bought it on craigslist for $300, and then reupholstered it because it came with this frightening purple polyester fabric
, so now it looks way better than it did before and it looks like I spent way more than the $350 (including upholstery fabric from Michael Levine's) that I spent on it.

On a side note: craigslist is an amazing place to find almost anything you want, and there is always stuff, even furniture, being given away for free. My whole apartment practically is furnished through craigslist finds (ranging in price from free-$80). You just have to invest the time for actually finding the golden items. So in the case of my headboard, I was checking craigslist multiple times everyday until I found what I was looking for. But seriously, if you want to find some fabulously chic piece of crap look on craigslist and you too can turn it into something beautiful.