Things We Love: More Space at the Antique Tobacco Barn!

Greg and I are pleased with our sales of antique furniture since we opened a space at the Antique Tobacco Barn in Asheville, NC, last December. We asked for twice the amount of space and luckily the helpful folks at Antique Tobacco Barn were willing to oblige. It has been a tremendous amount of work to get our new space, B21, fixed up and looking great!

The new booth is actually two areas at the end of an aisle, so we have quite a bit of wall space – just what is needed for big antique furniture! These two photos show what the booth looked like, looking first one way...

...and then the other. You can see that the metal walls of the building were dark grey.

Not only were the walls ugly, they didn’t show the furniture very well. They absorbed all the light making it difficult to see the beautiful carved details on the antique buffets and tables. Luckily, there were walls already built on the left side of the space, so we decided to build walls on the right side too and give everything a bright coat of paint.

Greg worked on building the walls on the right side with wood panels we had already painted back in Newberry – here he is in action followed by the completed back wall.

I worked on painting the existing walls on the left side of the booth as well as the floor while we moved.

Once the paint was dry on the left side, we moved all of the furniture from the old booth to that side so that we could paint the floor on the right side too.

This was kinda starting to feel like performance art! Although the space was much brighter now, we also decided to hang lights to really give it a glow. Greg isn’t so fond of heights, so I did most of the work high up on the ladder.

First we hung chains across the space from the rafters and then we hung extension lights on the chains. We think it was definitely worth the effort!

Finally we moved two more loads of furniture in and then cleaned and waxed it all to make sure everything looked its best.

The whole process took six trips to Asheville over a month’s time – whew, that was a LOT of work!
But we think it looks great and we’re hoping for big sales. If you’re in the Asheville, NC area, be sure to stop by the Antique Tobacco Barn. It is located in the Biltmore Village, just a couple miles from the Biltmore Estate. Autumn is a gorgeous time to visit Asheville to see the beautiful fall colors of the changing leaves!