This may not be the best way to follow up my “I stole from the Salvation Army” post because now I seem to have done a similar thing at Goodwill and you’re going to start wondering about my moral center. But I swear (again) it wasn’t intentional!
A friend tipped me off that there was a Goodwill outlet nearby. I had no idea that Goodwill had “outlet stores” and I must confess the idea of a place filled with items that are so bad that they didn’t sell in a regular Goodwill didn’t sound all that promising but I had to check it out.
It turned out to be a warehouse filled with unsorted piles of clothes with a small area of housewares and random furniture. And I saw this:
Bad paint job, lots of dings and scratches and whoever had owned it was a big fan of chewing gum (previously chewed and “saved” portions were in every drawer and under the top edge). They were also waaaaay into the Little Mermaid with stickers of Ariel and friends everywhere.
But there was lots of potential! It was solid wood with dovetailed drawer joints.
However, there was no price on it or, in fact, on anything in the store.
It turns out that, at the outlet, the check-out people call the price based on some secret rubric that only they know.
A woman ahead of me in line held up a chair and was told “three dollars!” The next woman’s basket of mis-matched glassware went for “two dollars!”
It was my turn and I pointed at the desk and the cashier said “twenty five dollars!”
It seemed like a good deal to me but I’m a little math-challenged and I had to take a second to calculate if, in the end, that price plus the work it needed would work for me.
But the cashier confused my “math-challenged” face for my “that’s too expensive” face” (totally understandable as both involve brow-furrowing and a general appearance of unhappiness) and she immediately countered her own offer by saying “ten dollars!”
Startled, I tried to explain that I wasn’t actually trying to haggle with Goodwill (which seemed like it would be another bad-karma move) but she just repeated “ten dollars” in a kind of adamant way so I paid and hightailed home.
I had first imagined the desk covered with maps or maybe Hardy Boys book covers but the more I worked on it the more I came to feel it was more of a little girl’s desk. And after seeing this in a Restoration Hardware catalogue
I decided to go with a classic pink, white and brown scheme.
I thought the drawers needed a little more dimension so I added some wooden plaques from Michaels to the fronts along with some pink crystal knobs.
And it came out like this: 
I thought it would look good in some little girls room but, surprisingly, I sold it to a grown (albeit tiny) woman whose only real concern was if her computer monitor would fit. You just never know….
