Glass, Wood, Metal, Porcelain: Why We Don’t Do Plastic

Y’all ever pick up a chair from one of them big box stores and feel like you just paid $200 for wet cardboard? Yeah. Us too. That’s exactly why “glass, wood, metal, porcelain” ain’t just something cute we say – it’s the whole rulebook here at Junk’s Above.

Walk in the shop and every piece of wood furniture you touch is real wood. Not veneer over particleboard, not “engineered” whatever-that-means. If it’s got drawers, they’re dovetailed by somebody who knew what they were doing, probably before your mama was born. Same with the metal – real steel, real brass, real cast iron, the kind of heavy that lets you know it’s not going anywhere. And the glass and porcelain? Give it a flick. Hear that? That’s the sound of something that was actually fired in a kiln, not squirted out of a plastic injection mold in a factory somewhere.

Right now on the floor we got vintage framed illustrations in real metal-and-wood frames, a leaded glass lamp shade with zero cracks (that’s a rarity, trust), real metal clocks that still keep good time, and a whole bin of metal lockboxes that have outlasted whoever locked them shut. None of it’s phony. All of it’s been somewhere and done something before it landed on D’Hemecourt St.

Here’s the thing about real materials – they get BETTER looking with age. Scratches on real wood tell a story. A little tarnish on brass just means it’s lived a life. You can’t say that about a laminate particleboard dresser from a warehouse store. That thing looks worse the day after you build it.

So when your money’s long, come find yourself something with some weight to it – something your grandkids will still be able to use. And if your money’s not so long, we got a dollar closet full of glass and porcelain knick-knacks that’ll do just fine too.

Real wood. Real metal. Real glass. Real porcelain. No phony particleboard. That’s the whole pitch.

See you Saturday or Sunday, 11 to 5.

— The Junk’s Above crew