Calling All Castoffs: You Have a Home

By PATRICIA LEIGH BROWN
Published:ti November 3, 1988

TO Elena Lomasney, love doesn’t mean never having to say you’re sorry. Love means a friend calling on the telephone and saying: ”Elena, come quickly. I’m throwing something out.”

Ms. Lomasney, a 39-year-old administrative assistant who lives in a two-bedroom apartment in Long Island City, is the Queen of the Castoffs. Nearly all her furnishings – the pots, curtains, beds, lamps, tape deck, even the Osterizer – are secondhand, garnered from her grandmothers’ attics, friends’ basements, the Salvation Army, street corners, thrift stores and auctions.

Anyone can squirrel away found objects. What makes Ms. Lomasney special is her eye. When she moved into her apartment last year, she was sleeping on a mattress on the floor and did not possess one piece of truly useful furniture.

Since then, on a budget estimated at $1,500, she has managed to salvage some of her friends’ – and the city’s – most pitiful rejects through a willingness to reupholster, refinish, reframe, rewire and schlep, with the help of Alfonso Perez, her ace moving man.

Ms. Lomasney has expensive tastes ”but no money,” she said. She also claims to love imperfection. ”I love old things,” she said dreamily. ”Perfection is boring.”

She attributes some of her love for castoffs to her European upbringing (she lived in Switzerland and England before moving to New York): ”I was brought up with homemaking skills. I also grew up with the old-fashioned notion of fixing things instead of throwing them away.”

She assembled the apartment bit by bit, following the adage ”All things come to him who waits.” Ms. Lomasney began by spending $600 to move some furniture from her grandparents’ house in the Canadian countryside to Long Island City, Queens, including pots and pans, a leather trunk, a chest of drawers and prints and watercolors.

She also had the good sense to befriend several of her mother’s friends, women who have lived long enough to accumulate things. Hearing of her plight (the bare apartment), they offered her castoffs: for instance, three antique wooden chairs and a love seat, all with no seats.

”I didn’t know what to do,” she recalled. ”I had never re-covered a chair in my life.”

But Ms. Lomasney never turns away a castoff (her guiding philosophy is don’t say no). After wrestling unsuccessfully with springs and horsehair, she turned to a Swiss house guest who, she said, was ”good with wood.” He made plywood seats for her (cost of the wood: $40). Spying an apt fabric at a neighborhood store, she proceeded to make her own cushions out of fabric and foam. She then embellished the pieces with embroidered cord bought from a fabric store in Manhattan. Total cost for the four pieces: $250.

Ms. Lomasney estimated that she has spent about $600 on acquisitions. They include miscellaneous items purchased at country auctions in Canada.

”Sometimes there would be boxes of fabric, including lace, labeled as ‘surprise’ boxes,” she said. ”They would go very inexpensively. It would be like Christmas when I would get them home.”

But the pieces de resistance are the numerous rejects she has adopted. The inventory, in her words, includes these items:

* 1 bookcase in sad shape, from an elderly lady’s basement.

* 1 bookshelf picked up from a vacant office on 23d Street (on a tip from an informant).

* 1 antique framed poster of a girl and her dog. Cleaned up and put in a new mat ($12).

* 1 dining room table, which I moved myself from a friend’s attic in Glen Head, L.I.

Ms. Lomasney’s modus operandi is best perceived in the living room, where her design scheme began with evergreen- and burgundy-colored floral curtains inherited from her grandmother. Soon after she moved in, a friend called and told her about a free sofa. Ms. Lomasney being who she is, ”sight unseen, I said: ‘O.K. I’ll take it.’ ”

She was horrified when it arrived, covered in a hideous green floral pattern. She promptly disguised it by hiding it under a linen curtain. Months went by. One day, on a visit to her local Salvation Army outlet – a typical after-work activity – she found a slipcover in an inoffensive green ($7). Today the linen curtain peeks out from under the slipcover and looks to all the world like a dust ruffle.

Ms. Lomasney spruced up the room with a 1950’s boomerang table, also from a friend, as well as an old chest in the family for generations and a large oil painting inherited from one of her grandfathers.

An impressive array of books adds to a sense of snugness. She said she found these in ”an old lady’s basement” after a garage sale. Although the authors of the aged volumes included Dickens, Thackeray and Galsworthy, no one had bought them in the sale.