I love old things. Furniture, lace, glass, china, books, rust, crust, odds and ends. Architectural salvage. I have for as long as I can remember.  I love the artwork, the grace, the workmanship.   I’ve “collected” for years – not always in any kind of specific way, and not always knowing why – if it caught my eye (and I could afford it), I’d get it. I had no plan, I just knew that I needed to “save” these pieces (for what, I didn’t know).

Living in the east is like hitting the lottery for me – there are a lot of very old pieces here because this part of the country is old and a lot of the latest generation doesn’t want all that old stuff. We’ve found some great stuff here.  AND, people sometimes put their unwanted items by the curb for someone else to pick up. Whooo !!!!!  That’s me!

But enough about me – what about Shiny Sisters, you ask!

Well, it started with a birthday card from a dear friend.   I love that card. It’s over a year old and I still love it – and still have the same reaction – OOOH, SHINY !!! And this was the same reaction when DF (dear friend), Sara, found the card. And so, over birthday dinner, she gave me said card, and when I opened the card it was an automatic reaction – and because we like so many of the same things, we became “Shiny Sisters” and had many a good laugh over it.

We didn’t do anything with Shiny Sisters, the business, for quite awhile. I was still working and she was working and we didn’t really give it any thought. I kept picking up side-of-the-road finds and she and my husband (Shiny Sibling) and I kept going to tag sales and auctions, buying “stuff”, again, not really knowing why, just that we had to have it. Mostly we picked up the leavings – stuff that no one else wanted. Somewhere along the way, though, (and I think my husband was involved with this), the question became “what are we going to do with all this “stuff”? Because, truly, most people only have so much room, and we are no different! And, since I was retiring soon, and definitely needed something to keep me out of trouble (more or less), we decided we would try to “upcycle” some of our treasures and resell them.

So BH (beloved husband) renovated a small barn on our property, including removing a completely failed floor and, since the structure dates to about the 1830’s, he found some c. 1850’s rough hemlock floorboards from a woman in northern Vermont (3 hours away!) and rebuilt the entire floor from the ground up, and with the hemlock boards on the top.  We also had the original slate roof repaired so we are now very snug. I would say “snug as a bug in a rug”, one of my father’s old sayings, but since we have so many bugs here in the east, I will refrain. Anyway, our little barn is cozy and a great place to work.

(Update – it is now December 31 and it is COLD – outside and in the “Shiny Barn”!  Brrr.  Insulation and heat to be installed in 2017!).