The Start Of A Four Day Weekend

A four day weekend! We both have vacation days to burn and we chose this weekend. It was Rob's birthday on Monday and it just seemed like a good time to extend the weekend. 

We started the weekend, as we always do, by comparing our lists of potential stops on Friday night and charting our course. There was nothing that stood out as a sale of great opportunity but there was volume and more stops increased the odds of finding something great. Off we went! 

We got off to an early start since our first target opened at 8 am. It was an estate sale of the contents of a lady who had moved into a nursing home. The house was only a few blocks away from our house and it was amazing! 

There was a great bar in the den / party room that Rob searched thoroughly for treasures. We think it would make a great Tiki room! 

The floor in the basement was amazing...

...and there was a mounted pencil sharpener down there!

The floor in the downstairs bathroom was cool too! 

Look at the old ventilation fan mounted on the bathroom ceiling!

This house was really great. It had a great old bar, cool floors, a great walk-in cedar closet, lots and lots of rooms and so much more. The only thing it did not have was a great kitchen. It was small and we would have to extend it into what was currently the dining room. This was definitely the time of house we can see buying together one day! Oh...and yes, we did find a few things to buy here including a great pole lamp! 

Our second stop was at an estate sale that boasted having "records and vintage toys". We were greeted by this little sign at the beginning of a long driveway. We followed its advice...

...and found the house. It was a fairly quick stop as there was not much inside. We did find the records and bought three of them. The few toys they had were of little interest.

After getting some breakfast, we made our way to stop #3, an estate advertising "60 years of accumulation". This house was a complete, dirty mess and smelled inside. One of the rooms lacked any working lights and that's where our flashlights always come in handy. Lots of rooms to search but we moved through them pretty quickly because of the smell. We came away with one old cookbook and lots of small Tupperware lids which were newer but they were the perfect size to fit some Tupperware pieces that we have that are missing lids. 

Stop #4 turned out to be an outdoor garage sale. We were fooled a bit by the pictures in the ad. We saw pictures of furniture and thought it would be inside. It was not. There was a sandwich board with pictures of the furniture and their asking price. If you expressed interest, you could examine the furniture. We looked through the stuff for sale outside, bought one piece of plastic Christmas magic from the 1970's, and moved on

The sun was bright when we arrived at stop #5. Monica is up on the porch in this picture but, with the glare, you can hardly see her!

The little squirrel was basking in the sun and looking for something to take home from this house too. 

It was a nice house with some vintage furniture and a cool old bathroom but, in the end, we left empty handed, just like our squirrel friend.

Stop #6 was at Grandpa's Attic, the company name of an estate sale company that we see pretty often. His sales are never spectacular but we rarely walk away with nothing. 

There was this creepy mannequin for sale which we did not buy but we did buy some records, a Thanksgiving die-cut and an old Halloween blow mold. 

Stop #7 sounded fairly interesting in the ad. "Hoarder's house". Hmmm...what did they hoard?  Was it old stuff? new stuff? Useless stuff? Disgusting stuff? There was no way to tell. We put this sale on our list but probably would not have gone here if it weren't along "our route". Plus, it was the second day of this sale and, even if they had good stuff, there might not be anything worthwhile left. As it turns out, it was an outdoor garage sale and we had been to this house last year too. They weren't the "hoarders". They stuff they had acquired was from a "hoarder" friend. It turned out to be a very worthwhile stuff because we picked up three knee hugger elves and an old plastic snowman candy holder at a reasonable price and, well, you just really can't have enough of these things! 

Down the road, we saw this great old neon sign and we stopped to take a picture of it. These beautiful signs are just becoming harder and harder to find and we smile at every one we see. 

After the "hoarder" sale, we thought we were done for the day but we accidentally found a church sale on the way home and stopped to investigate. We're glad we did. For $3, we left with several vintage cookbooks, two popcorn holiday decorations and a few other small items.

Here are some of the things we took home today:

Some records

A few more records

Lots of vintage cookbooks

A Peanuts book from 1969, a Hawaiian tour guide from 1966 and an old appliance manual.

Some Christmas stuff

Some Halloween stuff

An old plastic beer tray and a Thanksgiving die-cut decoration

A metal recipe file, an old deck of cards, vintage cocktail biscuit cutters, mouse cheese picks and some small Tupperware lids

A tension pole lamp

We made it to lots of sales, found some fun items to take home and, most important, spent the day together...and it was only the beginning of a long weekend! More on the rest of the weekend on our next post!