Vintage things that have REAPPEARED in your lifetime?

[tonyb]

^^^^^
Isn’t it generally true that bedrooms in more recently built houses are larger?

I can’t call myself a fan of much of the newer single-family housing I see around here. Families are on average smaller than they used to be, but you wouldn’t know that by seeing these new “communities.” Lotsa large — like 3,000-square-feet — houses with postage stamp yards.

It’s not that I wouldn’t have wanted a bedroom and bathroom all to myself when I was a kid, but that’s not how it was back then. In my parents’ and grandparents’ early lives it wasn’t uncommon for yiungsters to share not just the room but the bed itself. And bathrooms? Ha! They were lucky to have indoor plumbing.

 

[LizzieMaine]

I dunno, I've never lived in a house built after 1949, and even that house had thimble-sized bedrooms. My present house was built in 1911, and didn't have indoor plumbing until some time in the 1930s -- the bathroom used to be a bedroom closet that was converted by sticking in a tub, sink, and toilet and putting pink tile on the walls. There's barely enough floor space for a bath mat, if I trim off about two inches along the long end.

My sister and I had to share a bedroom, and sometimes a bed, until I was eleven years old and demanded privacy. The result was a room in a converted attic, with very low ceilings. I was terrified I would grow taller than 5 foot 6, but fortunately that didn't happen.

 

[Fifty150]

Wouldn't wonder, if the western Futonbed will become trendy again!

I remember futons as a child. They were practical. Excellent for very small apartments. Absolute necessity for living in a small studio.

I don't think they ever were trendy or fell out of style. I think it depends on your lifestyle. If you're living in a small space in New York, Hong Kong, Tokyo, or like me, San Francisco......... you simply don't have space for a huge bed, and a living room set with an L sectional sofa. Especially if you are actually living in 1 room.

the folding frames were, in my experience, cheaply constructed and poorly engineered

Pricing and availability. You're sure to find a better quality item, if you're willing to spend more.

Not me. If I were in need of a futon today, I would do exactly what I did the last time. Buy it from IKEA. Over a decade later, the $99 Ikea futon still works. Too bad prices have gone up. That same futon is not over $200. But it is still a bargain.

 

[Fifty150]

There’s tons (literally) of good stuff out there for little if any money.

In my world, I have a big fat American pickup truck. A Ford F-150. And I also have a van. I can get almost everything for free from Craigslist. I know people who have furnished entire apartments with stuff from Craigslist. Without admitting guilt, some people have engaged in coitus from Craigslist.

 

[Trenchfriend]

I don't think they ever were trendy or fell out of style.

Depends on you area. The western Futonbed was not common in Germany in the 90s, but with the 2000s a flood of Futonbeds came, for whatever reason.
But it's still a cheap and practical alternative to classic european bed, here. 1/3 of the classic bed/matress price.
140x200cm Futon frame 200 bucks, matress 100 bucks. I still like their No-Bullshit-Concept.

 

[Trenchfriend]

Man, let me tell you!!
I never thought THIS ever to come back!!

Twenty years ago when I was late 18, praktically all grocery store chains had these Vodka/Blood Orange juice or Vodka/Grapefruit juice mixes from the low-price Vodka brands/storebrands AND I FREAKIN' LOVED IT from the fridgerator! NEVER had the pure Vodka!

Often, when we went getting groceries in 2003/2004, I picked up a bottle and the first thing back at home was to put it in the fridge.
The Vodka/Blood orange was my 2,99 EUR favorite!

But for whatever reason, these cheap storeband mixes dissappeared in the following years.

But now, they have big comeback??

 

[Fifty150]

Ah, the resurgence of the craft cocktail. Classics.

 

[belfastboy]

In my world, I have a big fat American pickup truck. A Ford F-150. And I also have a van. I can get almost everything for free from Craigslist. I know people who have furnished entire apartments with stuff from Craigslist. Without admitting guilt, some people have engaged in coitus from Craigslist.






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When my Mother passed away I had a house full of furniture. All of it pristine, all of it large, not expensive furniture just very well made bedroom suites, kitchen, dining room etc etc from the 1950's....so semi vintage. Not only could I not sell it I had a hard time giving it away. I sold the chrome/arborite kitchen table set to a second hand store on the proviso he take all the other items too (for free). He agreed as he knew some families that would be able to use the items so he took them and gave them away to the poorer families. The furniture was 'vintage' but certainly not an asset.

 

[Fifty150]

No charities willing to accept all that stuff? In my little, small corner of The Left Coast, there are "vintage stores" that buy and resell everything. Clothes, furniture, appliances, art, etc. Amazing that someone would want to buy stuff that other people are throwing away. If I wasn't lazy, I could charge people to haul away that stuff, then resell it for more.

 

[LostInTyme]

These days all that furniture is classified as "Mid Century Modern" and is priced at or above it's original cost. Most stuff that had to be thrown away because no one wanted it is now both coveted and once again in vogue.

 

[Turnip]

But now, they have big comeback?? View attachment 535311

Highly recommend by leading dentists…

 

[tonyb]

As to the market for used/vintage furniture and housewares and such, it’s all about location. And timing.

I’m not in the business, but I’m acquainted with people who are, so this info comes my way. Styles and periods that were in the doldrums a few years ago are fetching much larger prices now. It’s been attributed to younger people entering the antique/vintage market in large numbers. It’s of a piece with “sustainability” sentiments. It might be a fad, but if it is, it’s a happy one for those scratching out a living in the trade.

Due mostly to its size, “just used furniture” usually isn’t worth the trouble of moving it farther than a pickup might take it in an hour or two. But then, stuff that was “just used furniture” not so long ago is now much sought after.

Kitchen stuff — dishes, pots and pans, even the appliances large and small — is often bringing much more than I’d pay.

 

[tonyb]

… If I wasn't lazy, I could charge people to haul away that stuff, then resell it for more.

As would I.

I had long held such an enterprise among my options should I have found myself in need of another way to turn a buck.

I’m a bit too broken down for it now, though. Just ain’t got the strength anymore, nor the stamina.

 

[LostInTyme]

I had always planned to climb a large mountain. Now, if I can walk down to the mailbox and back up again, I feel muchlike I've climbed that mountain.

 

[tonyb]

I had always planned to climb a large mountain. Now, if I can walk down to the mailbox and back up again, I feel muchlike I've climbed that mountain.

Look on the bright side: it’s faster, safer, and cheaper that way.

 

[LostInTyme]

Monty Python, "Look on the bright side..." (Eric Idle)

 

[Bugguy]

As a fat old man, I can remember the days of carrying a beeper. Then came the cellphone. Because of the rate plans, many people kept their beepers, and used them with a cell phone. Alphanumeric beepers were sophisticated enough for messages to be sent. You got your messages on the pager system, then used the cell phone to return only the most important calls. Cell phones were charged with a flat fee just to have the phone turned on, then you still had to pay by the minute.

By 2001, the shift was to cellular phone only. Motorola stopped making beepers altogether. Soon thereafter, commercial beeper service disappeared. Cellular phone service contract rates were still very high, but people had become accustomed to using mobile phones. In that era, I was using a brand named Nextel, which allowed for cellular phone service, and a two way radio. Nobody needed to send a text message. All that they had to do was activate the Push To Talk button and talk to me in real time. I still have the pagers and Nextel radios sitting in my garage. Actually, I've still got a complete 800 mhz radio dispatch system in my garage. When armageddon occurs, I will power it up.

The year 2002 brought us the iconic Blackberry. The smartphone era began. Text, fax, web browsing........ it was better than sex. In 2007, Apple released the iPhone. 2008 brought the first Android in the form of the HTC Dream/T-Mobile G1. Today, children have smartphones with more computing power than The Moon Mission........ if you actually believed that man went to the moon with almost zero technology, then declared that there was no reason to keep going back, and hasn't been able to do anything remotely close to that for over half a century.



Vintage Technology has returned. Along with "vintage" pricing. When you roll the calendar back to The 80's, I cringe at how many thousands of 1980's dollars I spent for technology. Today, I can get a free mobile phone, and it only costs $20 a month. For less than an hour's wage, I have telecommunications. And it's only 1/3 of the cost of a landline telephone from The Phone Company. No wonder ATT stock keeps plummeting.






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Mid-70's I started out with a Motorola Pageboy II - tone only beeper. I'd get paged out of a movie theater and thought I was pretty hot stuff. My work partner had one of the first mobile phones in his car. It was a radio phone and you had to connect through the mobile operator - like a ship at sea. That too passed and evolved into the bag phone. Did I ever hate dragging that brick around.

 

[tonyb]

I hadn’t planned to take up canning food, but my garden is coming in heavy and I wish to make the best of it.

This is not a money-saving practice. I‘m confident that if I bothered adding up what I’ve spent in growing this stuff and now canning it the sums would easily exceed what the food would cost at the supermarket.

If my work took me away from home I likely wouldn’t find the time for this kind of stuff. But I take some satisfaction in it. Perhaps I wouldn’t if it were by necessity. Maybe then it would just be work, like it was to folks a couple-there generations back, when canning was among the ways the struggling classes kept the ship afloat.

 

[Edward]

I didn't have a mobile phone until early 1999 - my parents bought me one and presented me with it as a gift the night before I moved to London for work. It was an Ericcson half-brick - a big step on from where they'd been a year or two previously. It still had an external aerial, but a short, 1" long, thick rubberised thing, not one that needed pulled up. Twice the size of the Nokia 3210 that replaced it just over a year later - that back in the day when contracts with included handsets were cheaper (might even have been before "sim only" was a thing?), and you could renew for a new phone every twelve months, not the two to three years they ballooned to a handful of years later. I well remember the joys of keeping it for emergencies, only using it for calls at weekends.... and getting caught out by a huge bill because BT never explained that their "call for free" 'Millennium numbers' were actually still billed monthly, then refunded quarterly....

Dad had the full gamut of the tech, working as he did back then for BT. Started with a pager, then his first "mobile" - which was more like a WW2 field telephone. Basically as 12 volt car battery with a handset stuck on the top - and the same weight as one. They called them "car phones" because you needed a car to be able to carry one around...


Not sure if I mentioned it before on this thread (my web connection is moving too slowly to check today), but something I've found came "back" is..... the Parker 51. Well, sort of. Yeah, Parker themselves made a LE version of it about a decade ago, but that was just a regular cartridge pen gussied up to look like a 51, not the same thing. The Wing Sung company of China, however, have since about 2018 been making their 601 model, which is very close to a 51. Not identical - parts are not interchangeable and they have adapted and improved the vacuum mechanism - but cosmetically it looks the same. Lovely pens. About £30 from a UK dealer, though I bought all mine direct for a little under half that, just needed the patience for the 'free postage' taking three weeks. They're wonderful, lovely pens to use. I went mad and bought a *lot* of different colours. I probably own about twenty of them (purchased across three years or so!), and I only ever had one that leaked - which the seller replaced immediately without quibble once I sent photos showing the problem. I keep other fountain pens for when I want a flexible nib, or a broader line, or one-handed operation, but these are my favourite go-tos. They're a bit of an indulgence, really, as I virtually never nowadays need to handwrite anything for anyone else to read - beyond a greetings card (and even then a lot of those I order online via one of the custom-card companies). However, there's a pleasure I get from handwriting for myself and using a fountain pen. The technical simplicity - also the notion that, especially with a true fountain (or, as in the case of the Waterman pens I have, an ink converter), I'm not contributing to the mountain of single-use plastics as if I were using disposable pens. That is, of course, a little compromised by having a lot of them, but still...

The original Parker 51 went out of production in 1972. Parker have sporadically released special editions and not-quite right versions, but always expensive... The Wing Sung 601 has, for me, brought back the idea of this style of hooded-nib pen with a 1940s aesthetic and a bigger than average reservoir as a really practical tool for daily use.

 

[Trenchfriend]

April 2001, Motorola T2288. Always liked it and used it until the very end, when the keyboard was worn out, after five years. Third-party batteries were always available.
Build quality was excellent, rock-solid!!