The price of making your house unique

I need a new bathroom vanity and sink but the ones I've found near me, are made from particleboard. I can't use particle board cabinet doors in my art, so no way am I using them in my bathroom!
So, I'm redoing the existing vanity, replacing the doors with beadboard ones, and replacing the sink and faucet with a set I found on the side of the road. Amazingly, it fits my vanity, and has cottage-ey "hot/cold" faucet knobs. However, the cost to install this top and put new pipes in under the sink (they are old and noisy)...$239!
The parts I found retail for $300, so it's worth it. And what a story...the plumber says, "so you find your plumbing supplies by the side of the road?"

Last night at Goodwill I found a pair of milk glass bedside lamps. A PAIR! I am infatuated with the lamp in the little girls room in the new Charlotte's Web movie. The decorating from that time was all about texture. I love it. The pair I found was rubberbanded together with that scary Goodwill appliance price tag "Sold AS IS"...for $3.99.

It felt daring to take this old lamps home, all dirty, but they are SO cool! and isn't that what all the cool homes in magazines have? really funky cool old lamps?

So I cleaned them in the sink with a brush (the dirt was all in the grooves), they gleamed. Then today my husband bought two rewiring kits for $30. Ugh. Then we went out tonight for shades, and I ended up with pleated ones, that might be all wrong, I don't know, but the white of them works (I'm really working towards all CLEAR colors in my house, no beige). The shades were $14 for the pair.

Today, when my husband took the lamps apart, I had to repaint the brass "look" bits. Brasso didn't work, so I don't think they were brass:-)

When I was at the dept store, a woman next to me in Lamps was buying a set of wrought iron ones for $30 flat. When I got home tonight, unsure of the shades I bought, I almost threw in the towel. But then I thought that in two years the dept ones will look boring, and I'll still have my ones that are at least 50 years old. That are so hard to find. That are as old as the house, and are unique like me.

And of course, down the road, when the house is in Cottage Living :-), they'll be a little notation about my lamps. "Found at a Goodwill for $3.99, Maggie's husband fitted the lamps with new wiring, and Maggie added the ball fringe to the shades."

You can't write stuff like that boring new lamps!