If I buy something new, I want it to be of good quality, so that someone else can use it after me, and someone else can use it after them. I also insist on owning things that are aesthetically pleasing. This means my tastes are, in some cases, painfully expensive. Fortunately, this is tempered by my disinclination to shop, and a similar disinclination to own a lot of stuff. I am not a material girl.
But the above also means that I can be perfectly peachy with second-hand things!
I feel almost ashamed just to admit that I acquired all of this stuff. Never mind that babies require stuff – it just isn’t normal for me to go out of the house and come back hours later with a car full of loot. Fortunately my nesting urge drove me precisely to do that.
Craig’s List supplied me with the crib, the changing table, and the rocking chair. Yard sales yielded the hamper and rocking horse. The brightly-colored infant gym came second-hand from a friend, the paper lanterns are things I already owned, and the items on the crib were new gifts. The one thing I bought new was the boppy, because the thought of using a nursing pillow that had been dripped on by someone else’s breast milk was just. . . eeew.
The rocking chair and stool were one of the most expensive baby purchases we have made, at $200. The crib and changing table together were $50. The rocking horse was $3.
Our town must have had a baby boom over the past years, because it is a hotbed for good second-hand baby and kid items. A woman just down the street had Craig’s Listed a set of three hutches, of which I bought two for $250. They’ll be perfect for the kid when he gets older: the surface is already a bit worn, so I won’t cringe over new scratches or crayon marks or requests to paint the darn things purple. The drawers are sturdy and open easily, and they are low enough for a reasonably small person to use. And the shelves are great for books and toys.
Most of the stuffed animals are new, but the Lamaze brand toys came from a yard sale looking spotless, and mom washed them again just to be thorough. Mom has been an absolutely amazing help with getting my yard-sale finds cleaned up. To give you an idea of how much a little elbow-grease can be worth, I paid $10 for the Lamaze toys, when new, they would have cost about $100. (And they would have come wrapped in three times their volume of wasteful packaging.) The mirror was $5 at a yard sale. I really need to get those wall decorations hung up!
There are a couple dozen books on the shelves already, including a whole stack of (slightly prechewed) Dr. Suess books. Yard sales, $.25 each. I swore up and down that I wouldn’t stoop to buying a cutsie lamp, but that small light-source on a high shelf is a paper lamp which has animal shapes that are driven around and around by heat rising from the bulb. I couldn’t resist. Yard sale, $5.
Before I bought the hutches, I had purchased an antique oak chest of drawers from another local woman, this one for $100. But once I got it in the nursery, I realized that even though the scale was okay for a small child to use, the drawers needed to be opened with two hands in order not to stick – no good either for a child, or a tired parent holding a squirming baby in one arm. And I wanted more storage space. Being a lovely oak antique, I knew I would also worry about the sort of damage that a child can inflict. And, well, it matched the master bedroom better than the nursery, anyway. So now it lives next to our bed. We needed a side-table there anyway.
The white thing on the right of this image is a co-sleeper. Basically, it’s a portable crib that straps to the side of the bed so that for the first months, the baby can sleep right there within arm’s reach. This was another awesome second-hand gift from a friend. It was missing the part that anchors it to the bed (the straps you see dangling from the bed) but as it turns out, replacement pieces to baby goods are often sold separately. And the manufacturers also generally have the instructions available online, too, which is handy for these crazy devices that fold up like robots. You wouldn’t, you know, want the folding to happen accidentally with the baby inside.
Speaking of folding up like robots, I also picked up two separate pack-n-plays at yard sales. They fold up like mad crazy origami, as well. (Why two? Because instead of spending $150 on a new one I figured we could test out two for $23.)
Anyway. . . in the photo with the co-sleeper there are also an absurd number of baskets. Every yard sale has at least one basket lying around with a $.50 sticker on it. Why is everyone giving away perfectly good baskets for pocket change? I am baffled. They bring back delightful memories of my mom’s Pilipino basket collection, and when their useful life is over they can go to the compost heap instead of the landfill.
The mirror ($5, but still with the original $50 price tag attached) and lamp (two for $3) also came from yard sales. And you probably can’t make it out, but there is an old, complete hard-bound set of Beatrix Potter books by the mirror, that my mother found for me at a consignment shop! I will treasure them until I am an old lady!
In the redundant department of redundancy, I also bought two highchairs. This time, my excuse was that I find the new highchairs to be vomitously ugly. Yes, yes, I know they have a gazillion bells and whistles and the baby will more than likely prefer reclining in a soft seat than sitting in a hard cage of wood. But I fell in love when I saw the wooden one on Craig’s List, and the plastic one followed me home from a yard sale. The cost for both: $65. Each of these sells for new for about $150.
My nesting urge went a bit haywire when confronted with toddler goodies. Yes, I knew we wouldn’t need them for a while, but when you wake up in the middle of the night thinking obsessively about the acquisition of stuff for the nest, it’s a little hard to put the brakes on.
The plastic bin shelf, the big cube toy, the wooden cash register (with awesome buttons on springs!), the rocking-horse wall decoration, and the rug all came from yard sales. The baby swing was a second-hand gift from a friend. (And a second one is upstairs!) the most expensive thing in the picture was the shelf, which was $15. The rug was $8, and the cube toy was $5.
Here is another thing in the Department Of We Don’t Need It Yet. It’s a child-sized easel, wooden, with a chalkboard, white-board, and a roll of paper that dispenses from the top. Yard sale, $8. In front of that is an antique dressmaker’s stand that I bought at a yard sale a few years ago. It was my computer desk for a while. The little chair was a gift from my mother that she found at a yard sale in the hopes that it would match the desk pictured below. The little rug was a dollar and still had the original tags on it.
Here’s a completely unnecessary thing that I just couldn’t resist. It’s an antique kid-sized roll-top desk. It’s more for my amusement and my mother’s amusement than for the child, who may ultimately find it to be the dumbest toy ever. Craig’s List, $75. The chair I found at a yard sale down the street for $3. And of course, more baskets. The small wooden object on top of the desk is a wooden cell phone. Yard sale, ten cents.
My parents very graciously had given us money for the purpose of buying baby furniture. As it turns out, we have spent only two-thirds of it – and on all the baby items we needed and wanted, not just furniture. I have been able to exercise my desire to recycle, collect a few silly antiques and pretties, and put us closer to our goal of paying off our home equity loan, which has been amazingly gratifying.
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