Necessities New & Used Furniture

This place is great – and huge! By far the best antique shop in town or nearby. I usually spend at least an hour here every time I visit, which is usually once every few months. They get a lot of great costume jewelry and lovely old books in and I like to browse to see what’s new every once in a while. The prices here cannot be beat. Upstairs (tucked away in a back room next to glassware) there is a box with old photographs for sale. These are always interesting to peek through.
The owners are a very friendly, very pleasant couple, who always make me feel welcome and don’t make me feel weird for taking so long to browse through everything, even if I don’t purchase much. I love knowing this place is in town for whenever I feel like stopping in.

We have gone here a few times and usually have left with something great. It is fun to see what you are going to find as you wind up the stairs. Great place and great deals and the people that own it are friendly and helpful.

Along the main drag in Hamburg, in a old Elks building (with a stage!), you can find three floors of used furniture, none of which ever comes from a smoking environment.
Necessities is run by a sweet couple, one part of whom was a supermodel in the 80s (I knew she looked familiar), and their stuff is high quality. It is hard not to get lost in the history of things, imagining what stories this furniture could tell. I can be pretty poky when I find tons of glassware, books, and postcards to explore — all categories where I have a lifetime supply, so it takes willpower, and a needed nudge from the no-​clutter spouse, to move along.
These vast arrays of items usually seem to come from housefuls of things relatives did not want, so I always feel a little sadness about what happens to our stuff when we are gone. I guess the lesson is to strive for less stuff.
Even so, we needed a piece of furniture and found several that fit the bill. The hard part was deciding, and the prices were great. The owners know their eras, and you can learn a lot about domestic history by knowing how things were used and what was considered aesthetic from certain times in history.
Other places like this are Garden Spot in Ephrata and GRQ in Kutztown, which are bigger, but Necessities is the tidiest and most charming.