The Ticket Booth

We have this table. It's a cute little table as tables go. I believe it belonged to my grandparents. I know it lived for quite a while in the attic at my mother's house. I stumbled upon it one summer when I was home visiting from Dallas. Since I had recently taken a course in furniture refinishing I took possession of the wee little table with the parents' permission. I took it back to cow country with me to breathe a little new life into it.

The table was covered with a few decades of grime and grit and probably had been subjected to more than one blast of rain from a summer thunderstorm. Thunderstorms in Norfolk, VA can be quite ferocious with rain coming into the house slant-wise and the wind blowing hard enough to make you think the weatherman overlooked a hurricane coming ashore. Anyhow, the little table had weathered quite a bit and was in need of some TLC.

Now in this furniture refinishing class I picked up a little bit of know-how about all things furniture, not just how to make them look prettier. The one thing that our instructor emphasized was that if you had a nice piece with "good bones" then it was worth your while to refinish the piece rather than to purchase a new one. New furniture is often made of a combination of wood and pressed paper. Yep, even the stuff that looks like it's all wood. Pressed paper...much heavier than wood if you can believe that.

So, I took the little table with its good bones and intact glass and put it through the refinishing wringer. Stripped all the gunk off. Then sanded and stained it and added a little glossy finish. The top of the table is a glass tray with a wooden border that comes off of the base. I figured to leave it like that with the wooden base and the glass tray on top and be done with it. My husband had other ideas. He had a nice little collection of old concert tickets that he wanted to display on the table under glass. I was more than a little skeptical about that, but eventually gave in. To my surprise it worked...looked pretty good.

The fun has been in adding more tickets as the years go by and as we attend more shows and functions. It has a couple of good layers on it now. As I recall on the bottom row we have a pristine ticket to The Grateful Dead which ticket my husband had from the old days when they tore your ticket in half at the door. For some reason he got away with his in one piece and has treasured that one.

The ticket booth? Why that name? When I had refinished it and we had carefully arranged the tickets under the glass and had placed it carefully in the den in our house in Dallas it took on a new life for our daughter. Turns out when we were out and she was home with the babysitter and often a couple of her buddies they would play tag and hide-and-seek in the house. If you tagged that table (which SHE named The Ticket Booth) then you were safe. Guess that wasn't as bad on the furniture as what her father used to do with his mother's teakwood table and a ping pong net.