There has been a little bit of a theme around here lately.  I’ve been getting a bunch of freebies.

First was the roadkill cupboard that I shared a couple of weeks ago.

My neighbor, nnK, found it on the side of the road and dragged it home for me.

Then the weekend before last my sister and I headed to a local town, White Bear Lake, for their trash to treasure day.  I’ve shared this event a couple of times before here on the blog (here and here).  Basically the residents of WBL are encouraged to put their cast off items at the curb and people are invited to drive around and pick up whatever they want.

We usually come home with a few things, but this year we filled up the entire back of the van.

Can you believe that washstand was free?  I couldn’t believe my eyes when I saw that one!

Those drawer pulls are all wrong for it, but I’ll find something better to replace them.

The concrete Asian style garden lantern was an awesome find as well.  Now, before you start wondering if I just stole that out of someone’s garden that was too close to the curb … no, it was in with a pile of other stuff and it’s broken.  The middle section is cracked.  But I am planning to try and repair that, and even if that isn’t successful, I can easily turn that part to the back and no one will ever know.  See …

Those two big boxes at the back of my photo contain a 7.5′ Balsam Hill BH Fraser Fir Christmas tree.  It was a bit of a gamble dragging that home with me.  It’s a pre-lit tree, so there’s a good chance that the lights may not work.  But I thought it was worth a shot since Balsam Hill seems to be a quality tree manufacturer.  I googled it, and when new, this tree costs $749!  Hopefully when it drag it out and put it together in November it lights up.

Otherwise it looks like it could be quite putzy to remove the lights and replace them.  But for a savings of $749, it seems like that might be worthwhile don’t you think?

The little black and white nightstand isn’t super exciting, but it was free and in fairly good shape so I thought why not?

Maybe I can do something funky with it.  We’ll see.

Finally, in addition to the roadkill cabinet and the haul from White Bear Lake, I also brought home this freebie recently.

My friend Jackie found this one on the side of the road as well.  It’s in great shape structurally.  There is a cigarette burn on the top though, so that meant that stripping and refinishing was out of the running as an option.

I actually already have this piece finished but I haven’t had time to photograph it yet.  I’ve been a bit busy.  My sister celebrated her 60th birthday this past weekend and my mom flew in from Las Vegas as a surprise for her.  My sister thought she was coming over to go garage saling on Saturday morning, and instead my mom greeted her when she got here.  You should have seen the look on my sister’s face!  It truly was priceless.

So, we spent a whirlwind weekend having lunch with my mom’s bff from high school (my parents were both born and raised in Minneapolis), a BBQ to celebrate my sister’s birthday, shoe shopping and lunch out on Sunday afternoon and then dropping mom back off at the airport Sunday evening.

Anyway, clearly I’ve been busy so you’ll have to wait until Friday to see how this mid-mod nightstand turned out.  Be sure to stay tuned!