Something old, something borrowed, something blue

Moving into a completely empty apartment with nothing but a couple of suitcases filled with clothes, was, I admit it, a little daunting. However, in a city filled with thrift shops, and in the country that gave you Craigslist, I quickly realised that the process of making a home was going to be a lot of fun.

In NYC, there is no reason to go to Ikea or other similar mass-produced, yawn-inducing stores. I want a home with personality. A home where things have a story about who they belonged to, the house they lived in, or how they were hunted down and found. And I'd rather not have to assemble my furniture – lego for grown ups is simply not my thing.

Each day, after we'd moved in, L and I obsessively scoured the Manhattan furniture section of Craigslist. This is one of our early finds and one of my first ‘home’ projects. The dresser had the exact shape I was looking for and in its shabby, off-white state was going for only $30. I dragged a grumbling L miles down south to the financial district.

We followed our map through an anonymous part of town but then found ourselves in a funky apartment where the owner sat us down, poured us tea, and wanted to know our life history. Hmm, we were buying a dresser, not considering an adoption. Nevertheless, we chatted for ages and she kindly sold the dresser to us and volunteered her reluctant boyfriend to deliver it to our door. Success!

From the very beginning I knew I wanted a brightly coloured dresser in my living room. And so I transformed the dresser from its orginal sad white into this gorgeous blue beast, and finished it with these sleek burgundy drawer pulls from Anthropologie.