An accidental discovery
Or, “Being broke is a full time job.”
In case you’ve never had the true peon experience yourself, I can verify. A large portion of my life has been spent just trying my best to get by with very few future prospects or hope for positive change, and I’m prepared to make a grand assertion - when you don’t have a certain threshold amount of money, your entire life becomes devoted to making that last dollar.
Your work never ends when you leave your job; rather, you’re heading off to position #2, or #3, or doing so-and-so a favor because you owe them $20. You don’t think about going out, dressing up, or what you want to eat for dinner. You spend your nights at home eating whatever strange combination of non-perishables exists in the back of your pantry. You don’t look forward to the “good times,” so much as you wait for the next major vehicle repair disaster, because you can’t afford a reliable ride. You aren’t inclined to browse the sales advertisements delivered to your inbox, because no matter what discounts are offered your shopping cart will still amount to more than the $0 in your bank account. There’s no such thing as a seasonal wardrobe or trading in devices that are past their prime.
There’s also no spare cash for furnishing a rental house.
This was my experience when my significant other and I relocated from central Illinois to Atlanta last August. Previously, we had inhabited two separate apartment units up north with few actual belongings in our names; him, a “Sad House” boy, rapidly nearing his 30s and still lacking adult furnishings, although he owned enough goddamn percussion instruments to sit, eat, and sleep on. Me, an anxiety-bound “responsible spender,” who refused to purchase furniture for a shitty apartment in a dead-end town that I was determined to leave behind.
When we arrived in Atlanta with 20 foot U-Haul truck at 2:30am, August 7th 2017, we pulled a single mattress out of the back of the vehicle and settled in for the rest of the night. This mattress, a well-worn craigslist couch covered in dog hair, and a free futon were the only pieces of furniture to speak of. Looking around at the 2000+ square foot split level home we now technically inhabited, it was clear that we had a desperate need for storage and surfaces. We had nowhere to put our sentimental keepsakes, our reading materials, or our underpants. We needed some fucking furniture.
First we tried the most obvious consumerist routes. I got online, dicked around with promo codes on home goods websites, and found that we still couldn’t come anywhere near affording a single dresser. We tried the gold standard for cheap furnishings, IKEA, but walked out with cheap hand towels and our heads held low. We perused Craigslist for reasonably priced pieces, but only qualified for the items that most certainly carried their own lifelong diseases.
Finally, I did what I do best; I embraced my roots, put on my poverty hat, and went thrifting.
We walked out of On the Edge Thrift that very day with three dressers and two night stands loaded into the back of a Home Depot rental truck, all for a total cost less than a dining room chair runs at retail. None of the pieces were in brilliant shape or particularly special, but I knew that could be resolved. They were a little old and neglected, a bit beat up, and otherwise pretty “plain,” but I had plenty of experience spit shining shit. My fingers worked quickly on the ride back home as I researched a topic I had very limited knowledge on: chalk paint.
I spent a day or two researching various brands and techniques on the market, and had settled on Valspar Chalk Paint from Lowes for my virgin chalk painting attempt. Luckily, my boyfriend and I have the exact same skater boy sense of style, and we easily reached a consensus on color schemes. Dark. Grays and blacks with a hint of teal for accent. We headed to our nearest Lowes and chose two colors, Sunday Bustle and Opera Gown. Though I felt quite tentative to invest any additional money on our furniture refurbishing project, I loaded up with the Sealing and Antiquing Waxes to match. The two additional purchases appeared to be worthwhile after I compared the various finishes that could be obtained, finding this to be a particularly great resource for expected effects of layering Sealing and Antiquing Wax.
At first I was too chicken shit to get started. The voices in my head worked overtime to instill a sense of doom and deficiency, telling me that I would doubtlessly ruin the furniture and waste all the pricey paint. Luckily, motivation soon stemmed from my boyfriend’s patient encouragement, as well as the unorganized shit piles littering our new place. I took a breath and jumped. Within three days I had completed all five pieces of furniture without lamenting a single moment of the work.
Each day I awoke with an important job and a genuine excitement to get out my paintbrushes. I wasn’t sure what I was doing, but my anxiety was relieved with each brush stroke as the furniture came to life. After painting, distressing, sealing, and antiquing the pieces of furniture they were unrecognizable.
“Holy shit,” my boyfriend said, “you could do this professionally.”
Rubbing my eyes in the unfamiliar sunlight and looking around at my handiwork I couldn’t help but agree that things looked pretty nice i that moment. And although I had been locked in the basement for three days straight, it felt like the blink of an eye.
“…. Can I really?” I said, considering this fact, “Because that would actually be my dream come true. I could sit in that little room with a paintbrush all fucking day long.”
He responded with the phrase that a native poor like myself could never give themselves permission to utter: “Hell yeah. Babe if that’s what you want to do, you do it.”
And just like that, from the depths of poverty and the desperate need for a place to keep our respective underpants, my new path arose.
