Congrats Ultrastache!
Here's how a brown sharpie pen has saved us quite a bit of money recently:
We have needed a new dining set for a while. And I know I've always wanted to go with a dark mahogany shaker style square table -- medium sized to small. Have been wanting to set it up the dining room like a bistro or small fancy restaurant -- since we don't go out for meals often.
So I picked up a 34" square dark mahogany shaker style table for $25 off facebook marketplace. The legs were too long so we cut 6" or so off the bottom to make it a standard height table -- turned out great. The table top also had several tiny dings in it to where the blonde wood was showing through, along with a few scratches. I filled all those dings and scratches in with brown sharpie pen, rubbed off excess, and now you can't see the dings at all :) Good as new :) Photo below.
We'll be getting some commercial grade dark mahogany wooden chairs for the table as soon as we find the right deal on facebook marketplace. These chairs normally sell for $150-200 a piece new, but we often see them used for $25. They will most likely also have some dings on them, but nothing a dark brown sharpie pen can't fix! (It's amazing how much stronger commercial chairs are -- we will never go back to residential grade; these chairs should last us the rest of our lives.)
My mom gave me the lamp a few years ago and I haven't ever really used it, but it turns out it's quite nice on the table. We might change the accent wall's color from burnt orange to a different color later.. but for now we are liking it. For some reason the orange looks much more vibrant in the photo than it does in person. It's more flat and burnt looking in person.