Good Things Come to Those Who Wait

We've tried our hardest to ascribe to the philosophy that patience is a virtue when it comes to filling our house with things we love. Our instincts have at times told us to run to the nearest big-box home store and just fill our house with what we need right away, in the spirit of not feeling like we are perpetually living in an unfinished space. We've held out, though, and worked with what we have, trusting in the house-powers-that-be, and that we would stumble upon the right pieces at the right times. And, behold!  In the case of our kitchen storage dilemma, we were rewarded!

See, we have this gap of empty wall space between the window in our kitchen and the sliding door that leads out to the sunroom. A gap just begging to be filled with something. We knew right away we wanted to use that little space (which is about 3 feet wide... and, again, I failed to take a before shot of this particular spot so I can't show you what I'm talking about without spoiling the surprise) to add some counter space and storage to our kitchen. Initially, we filled that spot with a console table/wine rack we've had for years that we used to use in the entry way of our apartment as a spot for keys, mail, etc.  I also have no pictures of what it looked like in that spot, but here it is in it's new (and temporary) home, just so you have a visual of what we were working with for the first 5 months or so....

As you can see, it provides a teeny bit of "counter space," (it's only about 10 inches deep) and zero storage space (except for wine, of course).  Suffice it to say we were perpetually in the market for something that gave us a little more help in the kitchen.  We wanted something along the lines of this, your average "kitchen cart:"

Problem was, these puppies tend to run $200-400+, and we went months without finding anything that was affordable. Until we stumbled upon this pretty lady at a local flea market:

Isn't she beautiful? (Excuse the Piper photo-bomb).. we love this piece, and we didn't have to do a thing to it.. we were lucky enough to find something with the refurbished DIY look we love, without having to do any of the grunt work, and for a mere $75! We were initially thinking we might want to paint it, because we weren't sure how the green would go in our blue kitchen, but we kind of love the unexpected color pop, and think that the colors actually go just fine with each other.  Also doesn't hurt that it's forcing us out of our sometimes matchy-matchy instincts. Here's a different perspective to better show you how it fills our gap...

A perfect fit, no? And just enough space to give us decent workspace on top, two more junk drawers (because everyone needs more junk drawers!), and we've finally found a resting place for our oversized boxes of Costco goodies that previously lived as eyesores above our cabinets. Now let's revel in it's beauty with some close up shots...

 

She's sporting some gloriously unique and vintage hardware that I loooooove...

LESSON(S) LEARNED: Patience, grasshopper! It pays to hold out for that special moment when you stumble upon the perfect piece for the perfect price at the most unexpected time, in the most unexpected place (did I just write a Dr. Seuss poem?!). Also, turn off the ugly date-stamp on your new digital camera. (Yikes, sorry about those eyesores mucking up all the pictures)

Anyone else had similarly serendipitous run-ins with the Perfect Piece?