We’ve had the table in the photo below for a while, so I’m just posting this to preserve, I suppose, the back-stories of a couple of (very ordinary) objects that have a couple of my (and I am sure others’) memories associated with them. It is used as a bedroom table (a dresser?). The black thing is Zoe’s shoe cupboard, made from a recovered trunk.
The Bottom (An Office Desk)
The bottom of it, in blue, Zoe and I found on the roadside in Newmarket, Auckland. It would have been in our first or second week in the country; we had just bought our car. We saw the desk by day and returned by night to hurriedly stuff in in our station wagon and make our get away. The street view below was the scene of the crime on Broadway, Newmarket.
We were so guilty that we had effectively stolen this office desk (stolen = taken without consent) that we returned in the morning and left a note explaining and that we would bring it back. Rather than getting a call from the police, a lady from the place we found it rang us and asked us if we wanted anything else: she also explained to us that it was common practice in NZ to leave unwanted stuff by the roadside for a bit, just in case someone else did have a use for it.
The desk I am sitting at now also came from the same heist.
The Top (A Glulam Beam)
The table top was a glulam beam that was pulled out of the ceiling in the office I used to work at on Union Street when some remodeling was being done a couple of years ago – I spotted it looking forlorn and tip-bound and asked the guy to cut it into sections so I could swing by at the weekend and load the bits in my car.
We have moved to a new office now, actually only a couple of weeks ago.