By Emily Beckett
If you ask Sam Whisner why she opened Bits and Bobs, her antiques shop in Verbena, she wouldn’t give you the answer you might expect.
The obvious answer would be she loves antiques and wanted to sell them somewhere, so she opened a shop.
While Whisner, 77, does enjoy hunting for vintage items like furniture and glassware to fill the rooms of her retail retreat off Highway 31, she is candid about the primary reason she decided to embrace the unknowns of owning a business: She fell in love with a house.
After living in Germany, Serbia and Chile for her husband Richard’s job with the United States Air Force, the couple returned to the U.S. in the 1990s after he retired and chose to settle in Chilton County to be near relatives and Maxwell Air Force Base in Montgomery.
As they searched for a place to live, the Whisners stumbled upon an old, abandoned white house situated on the edge of the highway, shrouded by trees and surrounded by shrubs.
When Sam saw the house and learned it was in danger of being demolished, she told Richard she had to save it.
“I said, ‘No, no, no—it looks like the perfect place for a shop,’” Sam said. “I just can’t imagine this house being burned down.”
According to the couple’s appraiser, George Burton, the house was built in the 1830s and boasts its original heart pine wood, several glass windowpanes, original wallpaper, horsehair plaster and handmade bricks lining the short walkway from the gravel drive to the front porch steps.
When the front door is open, anyone standing in the hallway can see the smooth dip in the wood of the threshold from hundreds of feet walking in and out over the years.
“Think of all the feet that have walked over that seal,” Sam said. “In the 1840s to 1860s, center hallways were treated as additional seating areas because you could open the transoms and let the breeze blow in.”
The transom windows, located above the front door and back door of the center hallway, were customary features of houses in the mid to late 1800s and early 1900s before air conditioning became common.
The Whisners purchased the house and surrounding property in 1991, including a newer house just behind their fixer-upper where they live now.
After they spent two years repairing the roof, cleaning the interior and exterior and applying fresh coats of paint to the wooden siding on the outside of the old house, Sam opened her shop in 1993.
Her British friend Jan Canavan helped her with the cleaning and naming of the shop.
“In London, England, ‘bits and bobs’ means ‘odds and ends,’ and it describes the stock perfectly,” Sam said. “I like to sell things that people have an idea that they’re going to create something else from it—repurpose it so it has another life, a longer life.”
Packing the rooms and center hallway are books, furniture, china, glasses, children’s toys, clothes, suitcases, pictures, paintings, pots and pans, records, a cast iron stove and countless other items for sale.
Sam ventures to local auctions to find items for her shop, but she also buys items people bring in to sell.
Sam occasionally adds paintings, baskets and other crafts she makes to her stock, but she refuses to part with a snow-white, old-fashioned claw foot bathtub, a basin and a cast iron sink—all original fixtures of the house.
“This house has a wonderful history, and I’m glad that I could keep it alive,” Sam said. “The house is the character here. I have a lot of good friends as a result and a lot of great customers.”
Customers shouldn’t be surprised to hear big band music, smell freshly brewed coffee and cookies, be greeted by small, woodland creatures milling about the front yard or see Sam’s welcoming smile as they walk into her antique house turned antique shop.
“The place is crawling with chipmunks, and the lizards think they own the porch,” Sam said. “I have a lot of fun with the shop.”
Bits and Bobs is open every Friday and Saturday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., or by appointment.
For more information or to make an appointment at Bits and Bobs, call (205) 755-4853.