I bought a vintage sink full of plants from a shop called Sunset Junque, with the plan to restore it for our new laundry room.

CLEVELAND, Ohio – I work from a big wood teacher’s desk, painted white and scored from Facebook Marketplace. I sit at an old wood teacher’s chair, snagged from auction when my alma mater was demolished. A vintage aqua typewriter from a flea market sits on my book shelf, below a vintage Miami University pennant from an antique shop. Next to frames of vintage swimsuits, and a flowered Jantzen swim cap bought off eBay.

That’s just my home office.

Vintage stuff covers my century-old farmhouse, from the card catalog table in the living room to the tennis racquets on the wall of the mudroom to the potato chip tin in the kitchen.

When our house appeared on the Rocky River Women’s Club Christmas home tour a few years ago, I called it the Craigslist house, not to be confused with the professionally designed lakefront mansions.

See all of Laura Johnston’s home remodel columns.

Originally, my secondhand shopping was out of necessity. When we bought this house six years ago, we couldn’t afford a $2,000 pull-out couch for our office, so I bought a $100 used soga and camouflaged it with a slipcover from Target. I bought an ugly wooden file cabinet, loaded it in my minivan and painted it green. To create a foyer closet, I bought a TV armoire, retrofitted it with a rod and experimented with chalk and chalkboard paint.

It turned out I was proud of my Dutch thriftiness.

Vintage pieces are unique. They come with stories, layers of history that automatically make them more interesting. And you can make them into whatever you want.

Plus, there’s the thrill of seeking – and finding.

It’s a thrill I didn’t share as a kid, trailing my mom through antique shows. She’d warn me not to touch anything, then point to an Victrola record player or a baker’s cabinet and say, “We had one of those!”

Now I make my daughter tag along on our antiquing trips, so she can hear the same stories.

“We don’t need any more old crap!” my husband says, whenever I get a hankering for a new piece of paraphernalia. A vintage croquet set, for example. It’s now sitting on our porch, next to the scarred, metal Coleman cooler I bought after our first camping trip, and the pink-and-green lobster buoy I brought home from Maine.

Oh, but we do. Have you seen “Country Living?” The magazine features a new collection of antiques every month!

Currently on my shopping list: a brass mail slot and a highway sign that says “North,” to hang on the garage of our home on Northview Road.

I’ve been collecting vintage pieces for our new addition, a second-story laundry room and third-floor bedroom-and-bathroom suite, in our 1913-built Rocky River farmhouse.

I’m hoping to use an antique sewing machine as a nightstand. There’s a Dutch cleanser crate-turned-end table I hope to wedge in the corner of the laundry room, maybe beneath a Columbus Laundry Co. washboard.

The best finds are serendipitous, though, rather than searches. Which is why browsing is so much fun.

On a family trip to South Haven, Michigan, a few weeks ago, I bought pastel-painted boat bumpers now hanging on my front door. And a black-and-white cast iron sink.

The sink was full of dirt and plants, displayed at a roadside shack called Sunset Junque. It was $85, and the shop took credit cards. So I took a chance.

The new cast iron sinks I’d been eyeing online cost nearly $1,500. And those were just replicas of the old style, anyway.

First I need to clean the sink, and figure out how to update it with coats of epoxy and enamel paint. Apparently we also need to buy a bridge faucet, hire a plumber to get the pipes in the right place and add extra supports to hang it on the wall.

It’s a lot. But when I spotted a working example at when I went cherry picking at Quarry Hill Orchards last weekend, I felt vindicated. How cool it will be to have a working piece of history in our home.

This gorgeous sink is in the bathroom at Quarry Hill Orchards in Berlin Heights.

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