Quandie

the versailles of brandywine.

Published on June 11, 2025June 10, 2025 by Quandie1 Comment

Continuing on with my posts about our trip to the Brandywine Valley back in May, today I’m sharing our visit to the Nemours Estate.

This is yet another property that was once owned by a duPont. The main house was built in 1910 and has 77 rooms. There are 200 acres of gardens and those near the house were modeled after Versailles.

The Long Walk runs between the house and the reflecting pool and it features the symmetry associated with formal French style gardens.

There are fountains and statues including this guy in gold.

He reminded both Mr. Q and me of our visit to Peterhof in St. Petersburg, Russia which is sometimes referred to as the Russian Versailles, so that makes sense.

We chatted with one of the Nemours gardeners who explained that this is a French style of tree pruning called pollarding …

It certainly creates an interesting look, although I’m not sure I like it. Those trees look like I did in kindergarten when my mom cut my bangs right before school pictures. Not a good look.

There is a Parterre Garden that was prettiest when viewed from the 2nd floor of the house (I assume that was intentional).

This next spot was probably my favorite in this garden.

I think that tells you that I’m not really a fan of formal French style gardens, I prefer something a little less grand.

Now, French style interiors on the other hand …

shades of pink or pale blue and lots of gold. So pretty!

The French had it going on when it came to painting furniture. Check out this piano.

That could be some serious inspiration for adding some embellishments in gold to a painted piece.

It was interesting to learn that the plaster ceiling in the Reception Hall was originally painted to look like wood, but later painted in the French style. They’ve left a section to show that original wood look, which must have made the room much darker.

All of that fanciness aside, I think my favorite rooms were the kitchen, pantry and bathrooms.

Those copper pots are just gorgeous.

I don’t know what it is about these utilitarian rooms that appeals to me so much. I’m certainly not normally a fan of housework.

Maybe it’s just that in a sense they feel much more obtainable to me. I have pretty ironstone platters on display in my own home for example.

I love the floor to ceiling tile in the bathrooms, and I really like the sink below too.

Although the Nemours Estate was not my favorite of the duPont properties that we toured on our trip (I preferred both Longwood and Winterthur), I definitely think it’s worth adding to your itinerary if you ever find yourself in the Brandywine Valley.

And after touring the estate you can stop off at the Charcoal Pit, ‘home of Delaware’s best burgers and shakes since 1956’, for a late lunch.

Although we didn’t try the burgers, we did have some amazing shakes. Mr. Q also had the Rueben Dog …

but I stuck with a basic chili dog.

OK, hot dogs for lunch was a stark contrast to a morning spent viewing the opulent grandeur of the Nemours Estate, but those were some tasty dogs!

a garage sale triathlon.

Published on June 10, 2025June 9, 2025 by Quandie5 Comments

Can I call it a garage sale triathlon if I went to three different neighborhood sales in one weekend? I’m going to say yes.

My friend opK and I started out this past Thursday at the Spring Lake Park citywide sales. They provided a fantastic map that made it easy to find all of the sales. I believe there were about 30, and we found all of them!

It was definitely a good day for toolboxes and ‘statues’.

I had chosen the first sale of the day from their list of sales because the description included ‘statues’. Well … that cherubic guy on the far right is from that sale. Not sure I would call that a statue. Here’s the official Oxford definition of statue, “a carved or cast figure of a person or animal, especially one that is life-size or larger.”

These definitely aren’t life-size, and they are also pretty dated looking, right? But I plan to use Dixie Belle’s Patina Paint to give them the rusty look which I’m betting will really improve them. You’ll want to stay tuned to see whether or not I’m right about that.

The toolboxes were fairly plentiful in Spring Lake Park too.

I came home with three of them for less than $10 total. I recently ordered some of the newest I.O.D. transfers, plus another of their Rose Botanical transfers. I’m looking forward to using them on these toolboxes.

I’m also going to use them on this box once I get it painted.

I also picked up a couple of vintage tablecloths.

And an old shop stool.

I plan to paint that up just like the small stool I painted last fall.

Stay tuned for that project as well.

On Friday opK and I headed to the Bayport citywide sales.

We found the most stuff at the very first sale we stopped at. They had a lot of antiques at very reasonable prices. Granted, many of the items were not in great shape. For example, I purchased this desk for a mere $4.

Now, I should point out that the drawer was in working order when I bought it. But then it fell out while we were trying to load the desk into the car and broke into a bunch of pieces. Ooops. I’ve already sent it over to Ken’s workshop, he’s good at putting Humpty Dumpty back together again.

I’m going to give this desk a mini-makeover, and then I intend to use it to create displays for my occasional sale.

I also found a sled at this sale, I’m always on the lookout for reasonably priced sleds. I often see them priced at $50 and up, and I pass those by. But this one was only $12. It will get a makeover for the Christmas season. opK found a sled for me a couple of weeks ago too. So now I have two waiting in the wings.

I also purchased a really pretty vintage gold framed mirror in Bayport, and another mirror with a lovely old black painted frame at a sale we passed on the way home.

Finally, on Saturday my sister and I headed to the Nokomis neighborhood sales in Minneapolis. We always try to get to this one because it’s the neighborhood where our parents grew up.

But honestly, much like a lot of the Minneapolis sales, this one has gotten a bit too popular. The sales that do have vintage items tend to have really high prices on them. I saw quite a few lovely things, but they were all priced too high for me.

In the end I only made two purchases. I bought some white and purple bearded iris from one seller, and I bought a pair of faux pumpkins from another.

I plan to give these a rusty makeover too, like the ones I did last year.

In the end, I’d call Nokomis pretty much a bust except that I did get to see my grandmother’s peonies (and if you didn’t read about that on Sunday, you can find it here).

Oh wait, I almost forget. I also picked up a small bucket from someone’s ‘free’ pile at Nokomis. I’ve already given it a makeover with the newest I.O.D. paint inlay called Floriography.

This was a bit of an experiment for me. I didn’t want to paint the bucket because I liked its worn patina. So I simply used a coat of Dixie Belle’s flat clear coat in place of paint when applying the inlay (you can find full paint inlay instructions here). Otherwise I followed the usual procedure. As you can see, it turned out great! I plan to do more of this in the future for sure.

Speaking of buckets, I also added one of the new I.O.D. Home Sweet Home transfers to another bucket that I found a while back at a garage sale.

Both buckets are perfect for big bouquets of peonies fresh from the garden!

So I’ve made a start on some of my upcoming projects, but I have lots left to work on. I’d better get out to the workshop and get going on some of them!

grandma’s peonies.

Published on June 8, 2025June 8, 2025 by Quandie11 Comments

Good morning from the garden!

I think right now, early June, is my favorite time in the garden. Everything looks fresh and new. The fern bed is lush and green.

There isn’t any insect or storm damage on the hostas.

Nothing is suffering from drought. And best of all, the peonies are blooming!

Most of my peonies are planted out back behind the carriage house in my cutting garden.

I put them there so that I wouldn’t feel bad about cutting them and bringing them inside. They aren’t there to look pretty in a garden, they are there to harvest for bouquets.

This year has been the perfect peony season because the weather has been relatively cool, our highs have been in the 70’s, and even just the 60’s on a few days. This cool weather definitely helps the blooms last much longer.

I can’t tell you how often we’ve gotten hot spells just in time for the peonies to open, and then they last just a few days.

But this year they are sticking around a bit longer, they even last longer in a vase indoors since we’ve been getting down into the 50’s at night and we have turned our heat off. The house stays nice and cool all day.

Did you know that peony plants are remarkably long lived? I’m not talking about the blooms, but about the plants themselves. They can live for 100 years or more, and once established they basically thrive on neglect. I can vouch for the neglect part since I don’t really do much of anything for those peonies behind the carriage house. I really even only weed that bed once or twice a season.

I also now have proof of that of sorts.

Yesterday my sister and I went to the Nokomis neighborhood garage sales in Minneapolis. We like to go to that one because both of our parents grew up in that neighborhood. We always make a point of driving by their old houses.

This year we got lucky and the people who live in my mom’s parent’s old house were out and about. My sister, who definitely isn’t shy, rolled down her window and said hello, explaining that we weren’t weird stalkers or anything, just making our annual pilgrimage to grandma’s house.

Turned out that the current owners are the very people that purchased the house from our grandparents over 45 years ago! They even remembered their names. I mentioned how happy my grandmother would be to see that they had continued on having a beautiful garden (I’m pretty sure I inherited my gardening skills from that grandmother).

They invited us to take a tour of the gardens, and even to come inside to see the house.

As I was admiring one of the peonies in the garden, the new home owner said “Oh, that one was here when we bought the house”.

That means it was planted by my grandma! And I’m sure she would have planted it long before they sold the house. I believe they’d lived in the house for more than 50 years themselves, so this peony could be nearly 100 years old.

How fantastic is that? And how special to see that my grandma’s peonies are still happily blooming away in her garden.

Now I wonder how long the peonies out behind the carriage house will be there. Hopefully at least 100 years or more too!

setting the table.

Published on June 6, 2025June 4, 2025 by Quandie4 Comments

For the most part I’ve put my miniature projects on hold for the summer.

I’ve got so many other things to occupy my time when it’s nice out, like gardening, garage saling, floating in my friend’s pools, drinking cocktails on the deck, and so on.

Working on miniatures makes a great winter hobby here in Minnesota. Perfect for those sub-zero days when you don’t want to leave the house. But our summers are pretty short, so it’s best to enjoy outdoor activities while we can!

But I did have one last thing I wanted to finish up before taking a little hiatus from the dollhouse reno and that’s setting the table.

I started out with a set of plates and silverware from Hobby Lobby.

That shiny silver finish wasn’t really for me, so I gave them all a coat of gold.

Then I set the table.

I used the gold plates as chargers and I topped them with some lovely floral china that I ordered from Twelve Times More Teeny on Etsy.

Then I added some pink tumblers that I ordered from Whimzzy Co, also on Etsy.

I used a simple white pitcher filled with flowers as a centerpiece.

And FYI, those are real flowers. The blue ones are Forget-Me-Not’s and the white, of course, are Lily of the Valley. Both are currently blooming in my garden.

In fact, the Forget-Me-Not’s are having one of their best years ever. I think it might be because some of the other ground covers around it died back over the winter giving them more space.

So … a silver lining, right?

Whatever the reason, I’m really enjoying how pretty they are right now. In fact, this might be my favorite spot in the garden at the moment.

Those are Curly Fries hostas just behind the Forget-Me-Nots. They make an awesome combo.

But I digress, back to the table setting. I’m also quite happy with how it turned out as well.

I’d love to be invited to this little dinner party, how about you?

a visit to winterthur.

Published on June 4, 2025June 1, 2025 by Quandie4 Comments

Remember that time I went to Charleston in April to see the azaleas in bloom? And then there was a huge storm the night we arrived that knocked the blooms off most of them?

Well, who would have expected that a trip to Delaware in May would make up for it?

I have to admit, it never even occurred to me that Delaware would be full of azaleas, but welcome to Winterthur.

Winterthur is the creation of Henry Francis du Pont. It includes a massive 175 room house that he built to house his ginormous collection of American decorative arts (over 90,000 items). There’s no way this guy could pretend to be a non-collector 😉

Not only did he collect American decorative arts, he also collected plants including azaleas.

And as you can see, they were in their full glory while we were there.

The ticket for Winterthur includes a 30 minute tram tour of the gardens, so we took advantage of that to get the lay of the land. Afterwards we headed back to explore a few of the areas that I wanted to see up close starting with the Azalea Woods.

They were beautiful and definitely made up for the lack of blooms in Charleston.

The Peony Garden was our next stop. The flowers were just beginning to open, but this single variety was in full glory.

The Quarry Garden was filled with blooming primroses.

It makes me want to add more of these to my own garden, currently I have just one small plant.

Unfortunately they were doing some restoration work in this garden while we were there so we couldn’t get any closer. We had to settle for looking down on it from above.

The Enchanted Woods were a later addition to Winterthur.

This area was added about 20 years ago to encourage more families with children to visit.

I think I preferred the authenticity of the reflecting pool.

Next up was exploring the rest of the area around the house, if you can call a 175-room building ‘a house’.

I was fascinated by this rain water tank, at least I’m guessing that’s what this is.

As you can see, the downspout goes directly into that box so I assume it’s meant for storing rain water. And just check out the concrete lions that are holding up the box. No decorative detail was spared on this functional item.

We also took a self-guided tour inside the house where you can see just a handful of the 175 rooms.

Several of the rooms were decorated with hand-painted wallpaper.

And there were lots of spaces that were simply designed to display collections (because let’s face it, we can’t really call these non-collections can we?).

This room was just for candlesticks.

To be fair, I guess one could say that my own pantry is also mainly just a space for displaying collections 😉

As if the house and gardens weren’t enough, there is also a museum at Winterthur. It’s a small museum, but by the time we got there we were getting pretty worn out so it was lucky there weren’t too many exhibits to see.

I really enjoyed the one called “On Tour: Lafayette, America’s Revolutionary Rock Star“.

I have to admit that I didn’t really know much about Lafayette prior to this trip. Of course, I’d heard the name, and I knew he fought in the Revolutionary War, but that was about it. Check out the link above to learn just a little bit about him and his ‘farewell tour’.

There were also a couple of exhibits in the museum that I found very relatable such as the exhibit about the Dominy’s, a family of skilled woodworkers that made furniture among other things.

This display pointed out all of the details that went into creating this piece of furniture.

There was also an interesting exhibit about furniture restoration. This 17th century cupboard had been significantly altered over time.

The bottom section had been removed to reduce its height so that it would fit in a smaller room. It has now been restored to its original design.

This next piece was once thought to be two separate pieces that had been ‘married’ together, so the two pieces had been separated.

It was only later that the conservators determined that no, these two pieces did belong together.

Another exhibit explored the use of toxic pigments in decorative items such as books, wallpaper and fabrics.

Arsenic was used to create the vibrant green on the items shown above.

In case you haven’t already figured it out, I will warn you that it takes the better part of an entire day to visit Winterthur and see everything there is to see. We never did find the collection of soup tureens that I wanted to see, but in the end we were too worn out to look for them. Luckily there is a cafe with grab-and-go sandwiches and salads, so we were able to get some sustenance before tackling the museum exhibits.

I highly recommend a visit though, I think Winterthur gives Longwood Gardens a run for their money as my favorite place we visited during our recent trip. If you ever are in the Brandywine Valley area be sure to visit both of these!

carriage house sale recap.

Published on June 2, 2025June 1, 2025 by Quandie11 Comments

Just a quick recap of the Carriage House sale for anyone interested.

The weather forecast for last Thursday was sunny and 75°, at least right up until Tuesday. Then they added in a slight chance of rain. Then on Wednesday they said we’d have morning showers on Thursday. By when I woke up on Thursday they were predicting rain from 5 pm to 8 pm and I started to wonder what I did in a previous life that I was being punished for now.

OK, maybe that’s a bit dramatic.

But it was almost comical that rain was predicted for precisely the time frame of our sale (we were open from 5 pm to 8 pm on our first day).

It was a beautiful afternoon as we were setting everything up.

But we kept most of our merch inside rather than expanding out into the driveway like we usually do.

Sure enough, right around 4:30 we could see the dark clouds massing to the north of us. The wind picked up and I started to wonder if we were going to have to hold our tents down.

But in the end, I must have actually done something right in a previous life because we only got a few drops of rain here and there. The bulk of the storm traveled just barely west of us. In fact, my friend Annie who drove over from that direction said she passed through a massive downpour on her way over. Thank goodness that missed us!

All of that being said, we had a smaller crowd on Thursday evening than we had last year. It’s hard to know why. Did I not do enough advertising in advance? Did the forecasted rain keep people away? Were people out of town all week for the Memorial Day holiday? Is vintage decor no longer as popular as it once was?

The weather on Friday morning, however, was nearly perfect, and we had a fairly steady flow of customers. Most of them were people who’d seen my signs at the corner and stopped in on a whim.

The award for furthest traveled goes to Julie who came all the way from Duluth. Thanks for that Julie! I hope it was worth the drive 🙂

If you’re wondering what sold and what didn’t, I can tell you that my rusty stuff was some of the first stuff out the door.

I knew there had to be fellow rust lovers out there!

I plan to spend a good part of the summer coming up with more rusty creations for our next sale.

I had some sets of vintage kids books that sold really well.

I had them bundled by color and they all sold except for the yellow ones. I get it, I’m not a huge fan of yellow myself.

I was surprised to find that my decorated boxes sold well.

I didn’t have high hopes for those since they haven’t done particularly well in the past (although they do well really well at the shop).

That being said, the stuff that didn’t sell included anything galvanized. Watering cans, olive baskets, totes, scoops …

One notable exception was minnow buckets. I had three of them, and two sold.

Honestly, I never seem to have a good feel for what will sell well and what won’t. It changes from year to year. Stuff that didn’t sell last year was some of the first stuff to go this year, and vice versa.

As I was cleaning up after the sale I made four piles; stuff to save for the next sale, stuff to donate, stuff that can go to the shop and stuff that’s slated for a do-over.

Speaking of the next sale, I’m considering adding a fall sale this year. That will depend somewhat on my schedule since Mr. Q and I have a trip to Canada planned for September. But maybe? We’ll see.

Until then, a huge thank you to everyone who turned up. It was great to see so many familiar faces! I hope you’ll come back again next time!

rolling with the punches.

Published on June 1, 2025May 31, 2025 by Quandie8 Comments

Good morning from the garden!

Are you ever plagued by indecision? Afraid of making the wrong choice, or just unable to make up your mind?

Well, I’ve gone almost 6 years without being able to decide what tree to put in our front yard, or really even whether or not I wanted to plant a tree again.

Let’s recap.

When we moved into our house 35 years ago or so, there were two trees in the front yard. A maple to the right, and a black walnut to the left. My sister was visiting the summer that the maple came down. We were sitting on the front enclosed porch watching a storm roll in when it came crashing down. Lesson learned; when the warning sirens go off, take shelter in the basement or at least an interior room.

The tree missed our house, but it was a close one.

Back then we ended up also removing the black walnut (it was not a great tree, dropping those huge walnuts all over the yard) when we had the fallen maple cleaned up.

I replaced that maple with a 2nd maple, and the walnut with a flowering pear tree. Here is a photo taken in autumn when the maple had its fall color.

I loved that tree.

Flash forward to 2019. The maple was looking really good and finally serving its purpose of providing some shelter from both street noise and from the street light directly across from our bedroom windows.

Then another storm took out maple no. 2.

Ugh!

Once again, I chose to have the pear tree taken down when the maple got cleaned up. It had gotten rather misshapen next to the maple and it didn’t look good on its own. You can sort of see that it was mostly bare on the right side of it in the photo above.

Then came five years of being unable to decide what to do next. I really wanted to plant a Princeton Gold Maple.

I love that bright lime green color.

But did I really want to put yet another maple in that spot?

I thought about doing a Honey Locust instead. It has a similar golden color, plus the added benefit of tiny leaves that don’t really need to be raked up in the fall. But I just couldn’t pull the trigger on it.

I finally decided that I would just take a chance on another maple, so I started looking around for the Princeton Gold. I found one at Abrahamson’s Nursery two years ago, but the price tag was $250. Yikes! That seemed a bit much for a tree.

So once again, I put off making a decision.

However, the other day I headed over to Fleet Farm to see what they had in their plant section and lo and behold, there was my Princeton Gold Maple … and only $149. I bought it on the spot, even though that meant putting the top down on my VW Bug convertible and very carefully driving home with a tree sticking up out of my car.

Will it be three time’s the charm, or three strikes and you’re out? I guess time will tell. But at least I’ve made a choice!

In other garden news, I’ve started filling in the some of the bare spots in my garden that were the result of winter kill.

I lost three brunnera next to the potting shed, and I’ve replaced them with Heucherella ‘Pink Revolution’.

I lost my ‘Rozanne’ perennial geranium, or Cranesbill, under the ‘Limelight’ hydrangeas, and I liked those so much that I replaced them with more of the same. Last year these bloomed all summer and up until the first freeze for me.

Then I addressed the large dead spot next to the front porch. I started by replacing the ‘Sun King’ Japanese Spikenard.

Then I added three ‘White Diamonds’ fern leaf bleeding hearts.

They have a lovely blue green foliage and white flowers. Fern leaf bleeding hearts like partial shade, and this spot is what I would consider full shade. But I have another fern leaf bleeding heart in this area and it has done really well in this amount of shade. It’s one of the first things to bloom in spring and then it keeps blooming all summer.

I’m hoping the white ones do as well.

I also added in some ‘Unique Ruby Red’ astilbe just behind the fern leaf bleeding heart.

Up until this year I had a white astilbe in this spot that was loving its life. So hopefully this replacement will thrive, and hopefully we won’t have another killer winter for a few years.

Last up, I replaced the hostas that didn’t come back with some freebies from my neighbor nnK’s mom’s garden. Judy was kind enough to tell me that I could divide any of her hostas and help myself to the divisions.

I started with this pretty little one with rounded leaves.

And I also chose this one that is a little bit larger and had pointed leaves and a bit more variegation.

So, how about some progression shots?

Here is how this space looked last summer.

So fab!

And then nearly every one of those plants died over the winter with the exception of the ‘Stiletto’ hosta that you can’t actually see in the photo above because it’s behind a larger hosta.

Here’s how this space looked a week or two ago.

So sad!

I just don’t know what happened here. As I’ve mentioned before, I do have jumping worms in my garden. So it’s possible this is jumping worm damage. However, this spot wasn’t particularly loaded with the worms last summer. I definitely had other spots in the garden that were worse, and they are doing fine this spring. Thank god all of my gardens don’t look this bad!

And here is how it looks now.

By the way, all of those extra pops of pink are impatiens. I decided to fill in with some annuals this year since the perennials are not going to fill out for at least a couple of years.

You may also have noticed that I am using cocoa bean shells as mulch here. I read that there is anecdotal evidence that jumping worms don’t like them, so I’m giving them a try. I’ll report back at the end of the summer with any results I notice.

In the meantime, today’s gardening lesson? You have to be able to roll with the punches. You just never know when Mother Nature is going to take you down. You just have to dust yourself off and start over again sometimes, right?

the carriage house sale.

Published on May 30, 2025May 30, 2025 by Quandie2 Comments

Just a quick public service announcement to say that the Carriage House Sale is open this morning from 9 a.m. until noon.

We have plenty of stuff left, so if you weren’t able to make it last night all is not lost.

Plus we’ve slashed some prices. So even if you did come last night, you may want to come back again!

Please note, that Hiawatha thermos is sold, but we still have the silver one, and those beautiful vintage tablecloths.

So if you’re local, do consider stopping by. It’s going to be a lovely morning to be out hitting the sales!

Hope to see you there!

vintage garden style.

Published on May 29, 2025May 30, 2025 by Quandie5 Comments

I recently picked up a copy of Better Homes & Garden’s Vintage Garden Style magazine at the supermarket.

This is one of those special publication re-print sort of magazines, ‘back by popular demand’. Which tells me that people still love vintage garden stuff as much as I do.

As I’ve been getting ready for the Carriage House Sale (which starts tonight!), I realized that ‘Vintage Garden Market’ is definitely the theme of our sale.

We have quite a few items from the various categories featured in the magazine starting with watering cans.

This first one is a no-brainer. Of course we have vintage watering cans …

and some that are maybe not so vintage.

Next up, vintage enamelware.

Yep, we’ve got this too.

The article in the magazine on collecting (or non-collecting in my case) vintage garden books really struck a chord with me.

There were so many lovely books featured. Now I’m tempted to be on the lookout for vintage garden books myself.

And Sue brought a few for the sale.

We’ve got a few newer garden books too!

There was also a feature in the magazine on filling unique vintage items with succulents.

We have quite a few wooden totes like the one shown above that you could fill, plus any number of other vintage pieces that would be perfect as succulent planters.

For example, I’ve decided to sell on my antique newspaper roller that I used to plant with succulents myself.

I loved the look of the succulents in rusty iron urns shown in the magazine …

And I just happen to have a very similar faux rusty urn for sale …

along with a bunch of other rusty pieces of salvage for the garden like these old iron headboards.

I also am selling this rusty lady …

Remember when I purchased her in bright white?

Doesn’t she look so much better rusty?

FYI, I use the Dixie Belle Iron Patina Paint with the Green Spray to achieve that rusty look.

There’s another fun article in the magazine about giving an old structure a new life as a potting shed.

While I don’t actually have an old shed for sale, I do have one in my back garden and if you come to the sale you are welcome to pop your head in and check it out.

I recently recovered the seat of my wicker chair with some gorgeous vintage bark cloth that I purchased at my friend Lisa’s sale (one of these days I really have to share her sale with you).

Not that I didn’t love the bark cloth that was previously on the chair, but I needed to scavenge that for a chair that I am including in my sale.

The florals on it were perfect with the Miss Mustard Seed Apron Strings milk paint color on the chair.

By the way, there are three different shades of pink in that photo from three different brands. The chair is in the Apron Strings (read about that original makeover here), the French flower bucket is in Dixie Belle’s Apricot (read about that project here), and the oval lidded tin on top of the box is painted in Fusion’s Little Piggy (read about that paint job here).

We’ve got a slightly bigger selection of pink/floral items this year. I feel like the floral trend is coming back around, what do you think?

Although this next article doesn’t specifically pertain to items at our sale, I still thought it was worth a mention.

It features 7 tips about shopping at a vintage market and the photos are all from the Oronoco Gold Rush held at the end of August about an hour south of the Twin Cities. I’m sure that most of my local readers have been, right?

I suppose some of the tips might apply to my sale, especially tip no. 6. Love it? Buy It Now! Because if you don’t grab it quick, someone else will.

As I mentioned, the sale starts tonight from 5 pm to 8 pm. We’ll also be open tomorrow morning from 9 am until the noon whistle sounds in North St. Paul.

We are accepting Venmo and Cash only.

Hope to see you local readers there!

the carriage house sale.

Published on May 27, 2025May 30, 2025 by Quandie2 Comments

Those of you who have followed me for a long time already know about my occasional sale, but for those who are new around here I thought I’d share a little bit about it today.

My friend Sue and I started holding occasional sales out of my carriage house sometime before 2002 (I didn’t start keeping a record of it until then). We started out as just a slightly above average garage sale, but over the years we began to curate a nice selection of vintage and upcycled home decor items.

Originally we held just one sale a year, but then we started having one in the spring and one in the fall because we had a lot of inventory. It was so much easier to find good vintage items at garage sales back then!

I once found an entire box of old cameras at a garage sale.

I can’t even imagine coming across that today.

How about this haul from 2015 …

Not just one, but two vintage typewriters … and two sleds. Plus a couple of tackle boxes too!

I think most of you will agree that it’s getting harder and harder to find good vintage items at garage sales these days.

Anyway, eventually we slowed back down to just one sale per year, and then it all got to be too much for me and we quit having sales altogether after 2016.

At that point I had added blogging to my to-do list. That plus a full-time job, plus some pretty steady furniture painting kept me pretty busy.

Flash forward to November 2021 when I retired from the day job. I definitely had the time to host a sale then, but did I have the inclination? It took me until last year, 2024, to decide it was time to try it again.

My friend Sue signed on again, and my friend opK joined us as well.

And now, they are both back this year as we once again host a Carriage House Sale this Thursday and Friday.

I’ve been so busy getting ready for the sale that I haven’t actually had time to take any photos of the merch. But once again we will have lots of vintage and upcycled home decor including quite a few of the items that I’ve shared here on the blog, like the flower market tote.