Weekend Finds: Invasion of the Pod Sofas

In case you’re wondering what I’ve been up to—aside from roving around in search of vintage greatness—I’ve been attempting to organize the vintage greatness I’ve already got. I’ve got a new larger storage area and I’ve finally installed some shelving to help wrangle the chairs that seem to be multiplying like rabbits.

When there’s nowhere left to go, go up!

But even all of this work has not stopped me from dragging more in and last week featured some particularly fortuitous dragging. It all started with spotting an ad for this:

I always love finding Broyhill Brasilia, even if it does need a little work. It came from the estate of a centenarian who, I was told, wore suits up until the day he died and always drove a Cadillac—he owned 38 of them over the course of his driving years. A man after my own heart.

That would have been a great enough find for any week, but then I spotted two of these:

That’s right, two. Who could say no to these pods? And the best part is the shells are lightweight—you can pick the entire couch up with one arm. Still riding this high, a mid-week trip to the thrift store yielded this:

An Adrian Pearsall dining table! What. Is. Happening? At this point I was feeling like some sort of wizard, conjuring great mid-century pieces with mystical powers that even I couldn’t fully grasp. Though I was excited about the table, I couldn’t stop myself from wondering if it had been donated with chairs and, if so, could they be out there at a different store? That thought ate away at me until the next night when I literally visited EVERY THRIFT STORE IN THE METRO after work in a two hour span. That level of insanity did not yield the matching chairs, but I did find these cute sectional pieces:

This time I didn’t get carried away with the notion that the rest of the sofa could be out there somewhere. I’m content with these. But I still decided to do a little research online to learn more about the Pearsall chairs. As I did, I managed to find a set of four and another table for sale locally. Boom. Instant gratification. Granted I had to pay about 20 times what I paid for the first table to get this set and from previous experience that pretty much guarantees that I’ll find four more chairs for free very soon. I’m ok with that.

Don’t worry, that terrible fabric is going away (and with it the petrified foam dust that keeps pouring out of the extremely open weave fabric). Of course, on my way to pick these up, I happened to stop at a garage sale a block away. And, of course, I bought the two biggest, heaviest, most ridiculous things at the sale.

These definitely qualify as my most questionable purchases of the weekend, but I think they’ve got kind of a luxe look. And because each one weighs more than a Cadillac, the price per pound was very, very reasonable. But if I needed to rebound from this decision, a trip to the thrift store later that day had just what I needed.

More Broyhill Brasilia! Plus it was half price furniture day—these set me back a whopping $3.99 for the pair. I will have to do a total restoration on them to match the rest of the chairs in a set I’m slowly building. Although I may have lost track of how many of these I actually have. I’m hoping this makes 12, but I may be up to 14. Obviously I have more organizing to do in my storage. I might need a few more shelves…