We are so excited to be a part of Art Prize 9 this year. Our table is located at  Park Congregational  Church at 10 E Park Place SE. The venue has been so kind to us and it’s been great to meet new people. If you followed us here after seeing our table there, thank you. We want you to know that our entry there is actually looking for a permanent home and therefore is for sale. Please contact us if you are interested in purchasing it. We also would like you to know that we are able to build a similar table for you if this one is too big, too dark, too anything. By changing the table top material and keeping our signature tree legs, you can have the table that fits your unique tastes and space. Please contact us if you are interested in exploring that! Again, thank you for visiting!

Our signature design piece is the tree trunk table with matching benches. The table can be constructed out a range of woods but is shown here in beautiful solid walnut with a debarked live edge and hand rubbed oil finish with a clear low sheen protective sealer. Choice of wood effects the price of the table allowing us to offer this table at prices which match a store’s customer base. Benches can be optional.

The base of the table and benches are our unique tree root design which gives the illusion that the table has grown up out of the ground. The legs are made from 1/4″ plate steel which are also fabricated by a local vendor who we work with closely. All of the feet are adjustable at all contact points for easy leveling.

The table and benches disassembles for transport.

Although the pictures display it in an outdoor setting this is an indoor piece.

I am a thrifty person. Always have been, always will be.  It’s not really that much of a choice anymore, it’s just part of who I am. I can remember when our money was REALLY tight versus just tight and there just wasn’t any extra money to be had. At times it got really frustrating and I would just want something “new”. I would make a trip to the local dollar store or a garage sale and somehow $5.00 spent there on a few new items would help me release the tension and hold me for awhile.

Today, I love the dollar bin (now mostly $1.50 bin) at Michael’s. It can have the same positive effect on my mood. While Christmas shopping this year I saw some great little metal clip on letters at a specialty shop. There were similar to these:

but even cuter. They were all metal and had a clip on them so you could fold them over a string or card. I thought they would look great as a banner. They were .90 each which is not much unless you want to buy multiple letters to make several words. So, I passed on them.

Last week at Michael’s I found some fun letters in the $1.50 bin and combined them with black and white twisted string and some small clothespins I had on hand and created my own banner. Including all the materials, I spent about $6.00 and I can change the banner anytime the mood strikes me!

I tied the banner to our metal bed. It looks like this:

On my next post, I will share the curtain tie backs I made from the “dollar bin”.

It’s been an interesting and challenging year on the farm and today we find ourselves at the crossroads of change once again. Last September, after about 15 years of being vendors in three different venues in Grand Rapids, we decided to take a leap of faith and open our own store. For the past 10 months we have been operating Vintage on Lake Drive at 1503 Lake Drive SE where we offered our always unique furniture and home accessories. Summarizing a year’s worth of retail experience into one blog entry would be a daunting and unnecessary task. It would be like explaining a roller coaster ride second by second to someone else. They might be willing to listen to it but it would still not really give them the full experience. Besides, if they really wanted to go on a roller coaster ride, they would buy a ticket and go themselves. As the year drew to a close on our lease, we had to make a decision whether to stay or go and for a variety of reasons have chosen to go. Choosing to go is not the same as quitting, however. It just means we have decided to start again in a different way. Our little store will no longer be open it’s regular hours. Our lease doesn’t end until August 31 so we will be in and out bringing closure to that chapter but our regular business hours have ended. In the next few weeks we will be moving our furniture pieces over to Lost and Found at 445 Century SW. We will also continue to be a part of the Vintage Market the second Sunday of each month through September. We will be looking for more markets and art shows to participate in. We love the energy of those venues! We will also be working on our “online presence” which means a lot of new learning for us. As I write this blog the workshop if FULL of great pieces that are ready to be developed and it is exciting to know that closing the store is going to open up a lot of time for the creative process to occur. As we close the Vintage on Lake Drive chapter and return to goodpasturefarm it seems appropriate to at least give you a summary of some of what we learned even if you have never considered riding the roller coaster yourself:

You can do much more than you think you can.

There are some really amazing & wonderful people out there who you will never meet if you don’t mix your life up a bit!

People who own their own stores are some of the bravest people you could ever meet, support them if you can.

It’s okay to admit you don’t really like the way things are going & make a change, that is not failure.

That thing about finding out who your true friends are when you are in tough spot, that’s actually true.

We have amazing and wonderful children all of whom have supported us in their own way.

Without the support of Audrey and Josh Noorman none of this would have been possible for us and we adore them!

So here we go, another new beginning and a brand new day!

Back in December, we had an opportunity to participate with I Love Love Events to host this styled photo shoot. Lauren transformed our store into something out of a dream. Check out the blog and visit the other great vendors who participated in this shoot!

http://www.midwestbride.com/2015/03/03/winter-antique-wedding-inspiration/

When we first opened our doors back in October we had a chance to visit with a new friend, Chrissy. She shared her vision with us for a unique table for her living room. Bruce and she talked over her idea and he carefully put together the supplies needed to bring Chrissy’s dream to fruition. She picked that table up a few months ago. Just last week we heard from Chrissy again and she shared her vision for a matching sofa table. I hope she does not mind that we are posting her beautiful tables before she even has them in her home but they are just too great to not share. So, here they are, Chrissy’s tables. How about you? What would you like to design for your home? We can help! 

We enjoyed meeting Megan who wrote this great article on our store! 

On one of our very first days we met Bridget when she bought a lamp from us to put on her new dresser. Last night, Bridget stopped by representing WZZM and filmed an interview with us and took several great shots of our store during the busy Shop Hop. We think we had about 600 people in the store throughout the night. It was awesome!

http://bcove.me/wnu1frhx

Remember in “The Jerk” when Navin goes crazy because the new phone book is out and he is in it? That’s a little bit how we are feeling at Vintage on Lake Drive. We heard from a customer and friend today that there is an article about our store in the Grand Rapids Magazine on page 17 and we have not seen it yet! Can’t wait!

It’s been a great month and a nice start to our adventure. Only a month in and the store is packed with our great furniture line by goodpasturefarm and so many beautiful wedding items from Sweet Pea Hill. We’ve met so many welcoming neighbors and new friends. We got to hand out candy to trick or treaters for the first time in many, many years. We have run the gamut emotionally from joy to fear and back again. We got to go over and see some old friends at Lost & Found and be reminded what hard work can lead to. As we head into the holiday season, we are excited to see what will happen next. We will start gearing up for Shop Hop and the article about us in the Grand Rapids Magazine. Our biggest goals for the coming months include increasing our internet presence, increase our networking with other professionals, begin building our rental stock and develop a consignment program for our wedding and event business.

Development News

Eastown’s Vintage on Lake Drive gives sneak peek before official October opening

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DEVELOPMENT, RETAIL,SMALL BUSINESS

EASTOWN

When it comes to weddings, Sweet Pea Hill’s Carrie Koster knows first-hand how difficult in can be to achieve the perfect décor.

She’s been in charge of aesthetics for two family weddings in the past two years and says while do-it-yourself decorating is something she enjoys, it can be time consuming and difficult to find those vintage-inspired items currently trending in wedding décor.

“We have done a lot of our own work for those weddings and really enjoyed it, but also saw the challenge of coming up with those items that you would like to style your wedding without having to run all over to every garage sale in town looking for 10 metal water buckets or whatever,” she says.

So Koster has teamed up with her daughter, Audrey Noorman, to focus her 15 years of resale and antique experience into one place: Vintage on Lake Drive, a family-run business. Vintage on Lake Drive will bring together the wedding resale business she and her daughter run, Sweet Pea Hill, with her husband Bruce’s furniture rehab business, Good Pasture Farm.

While Sweet Pea Hill focuses on wedding resale and consignment, her husband’s Good Pasture Farms specializes in up cycling and repurposing of industrial and farm-style furniture. Bruce will also give consultations on custom rehab projects for customers who have an inherited antique item, have purchased an item they want customized, or have an antique they can’t use in its current form. For example, she says, he’s able to take a porcelain stove and turn it into a wet bar.

“Many people are up cycling and repurposing things but there aren’t a whole lot of people you can go to with your dream and say, ‘Can you help me with this?’” she says.

Vintage on Lake Drive briefly opened its doors to customers for walk-throughs only during the recent Eastown Streetfair, but Koster says she doesn’t anticipate opening the 1,100-square-foot space at 1503 Lake Drive officially until the first week of October.

In the meantime, she hopes to receive more funding to purchase additional resale items through the organization Start Garden, which uses an online voting system to invest in area startups. Though voting closes today at noon on Sweet Pea Hill’s online application, she plans on reapplying if she doesn’t get enough endorsements the first time around.

“You want that particular style or you want to create an environment for your events, but you don’t necessarily want to own those things forever,” she says.

Written by Anya Zentmeyer
Images courtesy of Vintage on Lake Drive