Our First Piece

                     Photo by: http://marisolizaguirre.com/

                                                 
Hello Darlings! We would like to introduce our first piece that started our rental journey. Her name is Cinderella (yes, most of our pieces have a name) and she is 7 feet long, has a dark wood frame, a soft robin's egg blue micro-suede fabric, and over 50 buttons (a.k.a tufts). To be clear, she was not born with these fine looks, but had to have some cosmetic surgery to get here.

Here is the before shot

                                                             

       We found her on craigslist and paid $40, which we thought was an amazing deal!  After she was officially ours we hit up pinterest to see how we were going to fix her up. We found a soft teal sofa that looked similar to this one so we decided to hunt for that color.

Next was to find the fabric. We went to a store that is downtown and found a color that resembled the one we had seen online. We were not sure on the amount of fabric to get so we just guesstimated (mistake #1). We got 11 yards at $8.99/yd.

Now to find someone to re-cover the fabric.... We had reupholstered some chairs in the past and considered tackling the project ourselves, but did not want to risk it. We found a place on craigslist that did upholstery so we called and they gave us a bid of $500 (mistake #2). We just figured everyone would have a similar price so we went with them.

And then the waiting game .... We were told it would take about two weeks to get done, but finally after about a month we got her back, with a final total of $600 (trust us, we were fuming when the total was $100 more than the quoted price). But, we didn't argue, just paid and brought her home  (mistake #3).

Have you done the math yet? Yup, $740, probably just could have bought a brand new one or one ready to go from eBay!

So to help you in the future, if you are considering doing something similar to this, we recommend three things:
1: To avoid over spending, call a professional upholster or research the exact amount of fabric you will need
2: Do not be impatient: call around to several different places that do that type of work (if there are several in your area)
3: Don't let them take advantage of you! We should have pushed a little harder to have them charge us closer to the quoted price. Of course we understand it is hard labor, but a nice heads up would have been nice.

Of course in the end, we are still in love with our first piece. We encourage you to find old furniture, whether it be from a garage sale, goodwill, or your grandma's house and give it a make-over, of course, now you know some ways to save a little money on your next project.

Cinderella chillen at a wedding

xoxo,
It's Vintage Darling

Introduction

         Hi! My name is Roslyn, I'm the one in the cream colored dress posing in front of a fake camera...  Oh, and the girl holding the film-less box, that's Jaclyn, my cousin/bff/business partner. We are two college students who  started a rental company in our parent's basement. Just kidding (about the basement)! We are from South Texas so people do not typically have basements here, so....we started the company in our parents formal living room. What kind of rentals you ask?  We specialize in vintage rentals, you know the stuff you would normally find in your grandma's house covered in plastic! As of now our collection consists mostly of  sofas, chairs, tables, suitcases, phones, other small accessories and a 1947 black Chevy truck. A lot of the pieces we find are from garage sales, estate sales, and even sometimes, if we get lucky, from an alley behind old neighborhoods. Most of the time we will revive the pieces, whether it be from painting the wood (cheapest), fixing the legs, or changing the fabric(expensive!). We try to take the D.I.Y. route as much as possible, but sometimes have to leave it to the professionals to get the job done. We are blessed we get to work with a lot of photographers who rent out our pieces as props for their photos, as well as with brides, who use the pieces to add decor to their wedding day. 
We love what we do and hope we get to have this little company for a long time, of course if it doesn't work out, we will have some awesome furniture to fight over!

xoxo,
It's Vintage Darling
-Roslyn