Spring Home Tour, Chairity Auction 2010

Well this weekend was infinitely more fun than last weekend. The home tour was lovely as always but more on that later. This year was the inaugural year for the local Habitat For Humanity's  Chairity Auction. It was a lot of fun as well as  very successful for the group . The chairs were all real works of art.

I wanted this one but it was outside my budget, it went for $175 and

should have really gotten a lot more. It was better than the crowd.

I also wanted this one, but it also was more than I wanted to spend

even for a good cause. And it was a little plain, but I loved the birds.

See? 50 chairs, 50 different ideas. Some were just good painted chairs

while others were art that the artist chose to use a wooden chair as their canvas.

Back to the home tour. This year instead of Colonial Revival this and Federal Style that and Queen Anne/Victorian Style Blah,blah "Great Uncle Whoses used these tweezers to take a tick of General Washington" , "This is the Thomas / Wilderman House. It was originally built in 1689. The only original room of the house is this hallway where in the winter of 1690 the entire Thomas family froze to death. Subsequently the hall way was bought by Joseph Wilderman and moved to its present location and used as pantry for the next 125 years when it was torn down and the wood used to make up the entry way of this home - which subsequently was remodeled and renovated to its current 4500 square foot Victorian Revival style in 1924, 1937, 1953 and 1991-1994. The current owners under took another huge renovation when they bought the home in 1989. Please note these priceless Crystal paper weights from Mr. Bigbucks' family..."

This year we were sent to look at examples of homes from many eras and in gasp shock! different neighborhoods! We were sent outside the traditional boundaries of the Historic District! And it was a much, much better tour because of it. This year we were sent to see a most remarkable and unique home that dated from gasp! 1950!  a Genuine Luston Home! Totally made of steel, top-to-bottom, floor to ceiling, roof down to ground. Truly remarkable and there should have been thousands of these marvels all of the country.  The reason is a really good, really stupid story of putting industry ahead of the people. Sound familiar? while its not exactly the same but the tune is painfully similar.

Yes,  built with more steel and better made than your current car.

This year we got to a lot more homes that we hadn't seen before. In past years tours we have been taken back to the same gorgeous  places more than a few times. If I lived in the "new" neighborhoods, I would have spent years being really hurt that my beautifully maintained, renovated home wasn't "good" enough to make the tour because my house wasn't in the right neighborhood. I'm glad they widened the net.

Okay, back to the chairs!  I tied up and sedated the rest of the crowd and they left me alone to be the sole bidder on "my" chair.