Category: garage sales.

Just a little over one year ago my sister Debbie moved here from New Jersey.  She was presented with a great opportunity to transfer jobs within her current employer, but there was one small catch, she had to move about two months earlier than she had planned.  So last summer she lived with Mr. Q and me for those two months of May & June.  The timing was perfect for her introduction to her other new job; garage sale wingman!

I’ve been training her in for a year now, and I have to say that she has the job down pat.

Yesterday we went to the Linden Hills neighborhood sales in Minneapolis.  It just happens to be the first neighborhood sale she joined me for last year after she moved in.  I knew back then that she was hooked.  Wandering around a gorgeous neighborhood tucked between Lake Harriet and Lake Calhoun, admiring fabulous gardens and really gorgeous houses built nearly 100 years ago, enjoying the festive atmosphere.  They even have live music with this wandering jazz band.

What’s not to love?  Finding great bargains is just the icing on the cake.

So a year has gone by since Debbie’s first introduction to the neighborhood sale and in that time she has made herself indispensable as my garage sale wingman.

First of all, she is willing to drive!  And she has an SUV!  That alone qualifies her for indispensable status.

In addition to being willing to drive and having the perfect vehicle for garage saling, she also has parallel parking skills, a definite bonus.

She also has suburb vehicle loading skills.  That comes from many years spent as a girl scout leader where she had to load tons of camping gear into her SUV.  We had that thing loaded to the top yesterday.  Everything that you see in these photos is from our 3 hours in Linden Hills and it all fit into the back of Debbie’s vehicle.

Including this sweet little washstand …

And this giant vintage game board that is 4′ x 4′.

I really liked the graphic quality of this game board, plus the size.  Wouldn’t it be fun hung over the sofa at your lake cabin?  Obviously it is some sort of dart game, but I have no idea how it is played or what the purpose of the numbered wheel in the upper right corner is.

I’m not lucky enough to have a lake cabin, so this giant game board will likely end up at either Reclaiming Beautiful or the Carriage House sale unless someone wants to snatch it up sooner.

In addition to those qualities, my sister is also uber prepared (perhaps also a result of girl scout training).  When I realized I’d forgotten to throw some kleenex in my bag this morning, she said, “no problem, I have some.”  When my hands started to get grubby after an hour or two of pawing through people’s cast offs, she whipped out the moist towelettes.  When I got a little hungry, she pulled out the candy that was also in her bag.

And she always seems to have an extra dollar when I’m buying something that costs $3 and I only have two $1 bills and a twenty.

So yes, all of these qualities make her the perfect garage sale wingman and I’m so lucky to have her!

And she’s catching on to the idea of refurbishing items from garage sales for her own home.  She found this lidded trash container yesterday …

She plans to paint it and either add a stencil or maybe some Cricut vinyl wording.  She needed a more attractive container for her trash and I think this is going to work great.  Plus it was only $5!  I’ll be sure to share an ‘after’ with you when she gets it done.

How about you?  Do you have your own garage sale wingman?

It’s finally here!  Neighborhood garage sale season!  And it started off with a bang this year.  There were multiple neighborhood sales to pick from.  But on Saturday my sister and I  stuck with my traditional favorite, Bryn Mawr.

It’s actually called the Bryn Mawr Festival of Garage Sales, and for good reason.  It is a lot like going to a street festival complete with food trucks, live music, porta potties and lots of people!

Bryn Mawr is what I call a walking sale.  In other words, you park your car, pull out your collapsible carts and you walk from sale to sale.  There is far too little parking, and way too many people to even consider driving from block to block.  Luckily my sister is game for a lot of walking, and by the end, a lot of pulling heavy carts laden with the spoils.

So Debbie and I found a great parking spot in the middle of the action and the first sale we came to had this display.

Unfortunately that dresser was a bit out of my price range at $150, but it was still a fun way to kick off the day!

My garage sale mentor (also my Carriage House sale partner) Sue doesn’t do Bryn Mawr anymore because she thinks it has gotten too expensive.  And she is probably right.  But I still can’t resist the party atmosphere.

I went in not expecting to bring home a lot of furniture to makeover, but hoping to find a few treasures just to keep for myself.

Debbie thought I was a little nuts for paying $8 for this …

But I love the graphics on the box, and I know I’ll find some great uses for the cards inside.  Also, since I think it’s fun to share, I thought I’d share some of these cards with someone.  I don’t need all of them!  So if you’d like a chance to have some of these yourself, leave a comment today!  I’ll draw a random name or two from among anyone who leaves a comment here on the blog by midnight tonight.

I also found a fun camera to add to my collection.  This one will be great as a holiday decoration too.

I couldn’t resist this little shoe form.

Or this red and green flour sifter and tiny green flower frog.  Wouldn’t the flour sifter be perfect with a red geranium planted in it?

I’m sure you’ve already noticed that there is some great ironstone peeking out of these photos, as well as some lovely tablecloths to add to my pile.

I also brought home this pair of old shutters.

They already have the most fabulous patina, so I don’t plan to do anything except clean them up.  Or maybe I could add some stencils and turn them into ‘signs’ of some sort.  I’m not sure if I’ll find a spot for these myself, or if they’ll be put away for the next Carriage House sale.

I did score a couple of chairs so as to not return without any furniture at all.  I’ll be honest, I don’t generally like to deal with chairs.  With all of those round legs or square legs with 4 sides each, they can be a pain to paint with a brush.  Chairs are probably better left to those who paint with a sprayer.  But both of these were too hard to pass up.

First this one with its gorgeous detail on the back.  I have no idea what someone was thinking with the poor white paint job that didn’t include the feet, followed up by a half coat of a gold-ish color.

Just check out that detail though.

How could I walk away from that?  I plan to paint this one with milk paint and I’ll keep my fingers crossed for a nice chippy finish.  I’ll have Ken cut a new seat, which I can then upholster myself.

I also grabbed this chair.  It also has a wonderfully aged paint job, but a ruined cane seat.

I hemmed and hawed about throwing this one in the cart.  But it was only $5 and I knew it would make a perfect ‘planter chair’.

Here’s how to make your own planter chair.  Buy a chair with a round hole where the seat once was.  Add a hanging basket of flowers.  And voila!

These are super cute on a patio or porch, or even just tucked into a garden bed somewhere.  They are great for moving around to a spot in the garden that needs a little more height, or to fill in an area where perennials are not currently blooming.

If you’re wondering how long a chair like this will hold up out in the elements, I’d say I usually can get 2 – 3 seasons out of them, but ultimately they will get ruined.  Since I’ve only spent $5 on the chair, I don’t feel like it needs to last forever.

I’m giving this one to Mr. Q’s mom for mother’s day though.  I think she’ll get a kick out of it.

I’ve saved the item that earns ‘find of the day’ status for last.  I didn’t actually get this piece at Bryn Mawr though.  I took some time off at the day job last Thursday and was hard at work cleaning out my workshop when my friend Meggan texted and told me she’d seen an amazing bench at a garage sale just one town over.  She included a photo and told me that the seller said it was made from a bed that her parents brought over from Belgium.  That seemed like kismet, since my next trip to Europe will be to Belgium and my sister and I have been studying up in preparation.  It clearly was meant to be mine!  So I sent Mr. Q to the address with some cash and he came home with this.

Isn’t it awesome?  I might even have to keep this one.

Last year I shared a post about a local Trash to Treasure Day.  The City of White Bear Lake organizes a Saturday where its residents can put unwanted items at the curb for free.  And crazy people like myself can drive around and just take stuff.

Here’s what I nabbed last year.

Here’s how the pair of chairs looked with a new paint job and fresh seat covers.

Here’s what happened with the radio cabinet shell after Ken added new legs, and I painted it.

I just cleaned up the suitcases with some soap and water and sold them at my Carriage House sale.

And finally, the sewing machine table with a paint job.

I debated whether or not to head to White Bear Lake again this year.  Even though I ended up with some fun stuff last year, it’s a lot of driving around randomly.  There are no signs on the street corners letting you know if there are items to be found on that street, so you really have to just cruise every neighborhood.  On the plus side, it’s not far from home for me.  So when the weather forecast called for a dry day (finally!  we’ve had a lot of rain recently), and when my sister said sure, she’d tag along, I decided why not?

Here’s what Debbie and I came home with this year.

The chairs were our first find, we had driven around for a bit before we came upon them.  I had already passed on an antique dresser that was missing all of its drawers.  I debated taking it and turning it into a bookcase.  I’ve seen that done on pinterest.  But one side was really damaged as well, so in the end I decided not to grab that.

Debbie spotted that fab Cariboo box ahead of me and called dibs on it.

The wooden bucket is her find as well.  If it were mine, I would paint it with some chippy MMS milk paint and put a stencil on it.  She’s going to use it on her balcony as a planter, but I’m not sure if she plans to paint it or anything first.

I’m giving the ‘find of the day’ honors to the vintage typewriter.

I hardly needed another vintage typewriter, but it was right there free for the taking.  How could I pass it up?

I have no idea what I’m doing with a trio of mid-century typewriters!

I think there is a good chance you’ll find one or more of these at my fall Carriage House sale!

My trash to treasure day was capped off with the Pink Martini concert at Orchestra Hall on Saturday night.

If you’ve always wanted to see people dancing in their seats and not just one, but two conga lines at Orchestra Hall, this was your chance.  It was an awesome show.  If you’ve never heard of Pink Martini, they are very hard to describe.  They are an international group of musicians, and Saturday they sang a couple of songs in French, one in German, one in Japanese, one in Arabic, one in Croatian, one in Spanish and quite a few in English.

Their lead singer told a great story.  She said they’d decided to make a pilgrimage to Paisley Park while they were in town so they hired an Uber car to take them out there.  They were chatting with the driver on the journey and mentioned that they were from Portland and the driver said “oh, I’m going to see a band from Portland tonight, Pink Martini.  Have you heard of them?”

Imagine his surprise when he realized they were in his car!  He was in the audience and gave them a wave.

Yesterday was my sister’s birthday, so we had brunch in the morning followed by a trip up to the Franconia Sculpture Garden.  I’ll be sharing that sometime soon, so stay tuned!

Mac Grove is always one of my favorite neighborhood sales.  For those of you not from around here, the long name for this area is Macalester Groveland and it is near Macalester College in St. Paul.  Their neighborhood sales were last Saturday and about 40 homes were participating.  I picked my sister up at about 7:30 and we headed off.  Debbie was in charge of navigation and I was the driver.

I found some great vintage books and one of my fave finds was a ziploc bag full of vintage aqua Christmas bulbs.  Debbie spotted these, by the way.  I went right past them without noticing, but she held them up and said “um, hey, isn’t this your color?”  Dang!  Why yes it is!

These don’t qualify as the ‘find of the day’ though.  That honor goes to the pile of vintage luggage.  All from one sale.

Isn’t this little train case incredibly charming?  And it matches my MMS Flow Blue chair perfectly.

As if this matched set wasn’t enough, there were two more pieces that didn’t match including this charming monogrammed piece.

Who remembers Northwest Orient Airlines?  They dropped the “Orient” in 1986, and of course merged with Delta in 2008.

I also found a lovely brown transferware pitcher and some primitive wooden utensils.

My pile of goodies was full of my favorite shades of blue and green.

After taking that photo, I decided to get out my macro lens and play around with some close ups of the little milk truck so you could see the detail.

Seriously, how could I resist this thing?   The color, the patina, the little cow on the door panel.  And it was only 50 cents, so who could pass it by?

I still struggle a bit with the macro lens.  When I bought it I thought I would use it a lot for flower close ups.  Why I thought I needed close up photos of flowers is beyond me now.  The depth of field with a macro lens is very small.  You can see the results of that in this next photo.  Only the exact portion of the plate that I focused on is crisp (sort of?), while everything that is slightly closer or further away is out of focus.  This can be fun to play around with, but it is also rather frustrating.

When I took the closeups of the aqua bottle I could actually read what it said.

So I googled it to see if it was legit.  Turns out Dr. Pierce’s Favorite Prescription was a typical quack medicine from the late 1800’s to early 1900’s that originally contained opium.

A sales pitch for it said, “No one can know the distress of my mind as well as body. Dr. Pierce’s Favorite Prescription was the only medicine that seemed to do me any good. After I had taken the first bottle and part of the second. I could sleep well and all my troubles began to get better. I believe I took eight bottles and then I felt like a different person. I gave birth to another baby and my old complaint came back. I began using the “Favorite Prescription” and was soon relieved and was able to do my work, including the washing.”

Well, thank goodness she could do the washing, right?  She probably really enjoyed doing the washing after slurping down eight bottles of that stuff.

Too bad it was empty when I bought it!

First of all, just wanted to say thanks to everyone who showed up for the Eye Candy opening yesterday.  It was a gorgeous day, the wine kept flowing, the band was awesome and the shop is really darling.  And another big thanks to those of you who supported me in spirit even though you live too far away to show up in person!

Meanwhile, last week one of my regular sale customers emailed me at work to let me know about an estate sale taking place not far from my office.  Close enough for a lunchtime jaunt anyway.  So I invited my co-worker Cathy to join me and we hopped in the convertible and headed over.  I drive a baby blue convertible VW bug, by the way.  Not totally conducive to bringing home furniture, but if conditions are right and the top can be down, you’d be surprised what I can fit in there.

In this case, it was a gloriously sunny day.  Perfect convertible weather.  So off we went.

And I came back with this …

This was another dirty, junky sale.  No dirty Balls (jars, that is) this time though.

What I did find that really made me happy was a pile of crusty old paint brushes.  And actually, they weren’t in a pile, they were scattered about.  It was a lot like an Easter egg hunt.  Here’s one!  Oh, and here’s another one over here!  Here’s a big one!  And here’s a yellow one!

I have a plan for these crusty brushes, you’ll just have to wait and see.

In addition to the paint brushes, there were a couple of shop brushes (at least that’s what I call them) that I couldn’t resist.

Am I nuts for thinking these are kind of cool?  I have a plan in my head for these too, so we’ll see how they turn out.

I bought the green ammo box strictly because of its color.

I mean seriously, wouldn’t you have too?  The bottom was partially rotted away though, I’ve already had Ken make a new bottom using some old wood I had.  Personally, my goal is to make my vintage pieces functional.  So in this case, I wanted the box to provide storage for someone.

I originally planned to paint both of the toolboxes.

But this one has a rather nice patina except for that darn swath of white spray paint down the right side.  So I decided to try sanding that down.  It helped tone it down a bit.  I added a couple of stencils, and I think it turned out rather fab.

This was a fun sale to dig around in.  There was so much stuff!  Unfortunately, we had a limited amount of time.  I’m sure if I’d kept digging I could have found more diamonds in the rough.  Although I was out of cash in addition to time.  So we piled everything into the bug and headed back to work.

Another lunch hour well spent!  Thanks for the heads up on this one Jenny!

I was out doing some lunchtime garage saling again last week.  I brought home this little pile of treasures.

Everything pictured will get some sort of a makeover.  I started with the big wood caddy and simply added a stencil.

I believe this carrier was meant for gathering cut flowers.  I filled mine with some stock (that is the name of the flower, in case you are finding that confusing).  I wish I could say that I grew this myself because I think it would be lovely in the garden, but no, I purchased it from a front yard plant cart while garage saling last weekend.

The second wood caddy needed a more serious makeover.  That green tree and fence stencil had to go.

I painted the entire thing with Fusion’s Laurentien.

Then I added a French stencil in white to both sides.

So much better than the tree, am I right?

I used the same beautiful stock to stage this photo, but this time it’s in a blue canning jar.  I love the pale pink in combination with the pale yellow centers.  So pretty.

I’m still working on the basket, the 3 small chairs and the little watering can, so you’ll just have to stay tuned to see those!

Downward through the evening twilight,
In the days that are forgotten,
In the unremembered ages,
From the full moon fell Nokomis …

Yep, that’s the Nokomis that the neighborhood we garage saled in on Saturday is named after.  It’s also the neighborhood where both of my parents grew up.  And last Saturday it was the site of the most fantastic garage sale jackpot this year!

Where do I even start?  The fabulosity was just overflowing!

Our party included myself, my sister and my friend Mary Kate who I have garage saled with since she was just a wee lass.  The forecast called for heavy rain and thunderstorms, but we are not daunted by such things.  We’re practically professionals, wink.  We just went into it assuming we’d end up drenched.  And the day did start out rainy, which makes things a little trickier because everything is tucked away in garages.  You can’t manage the ‘drive by’, where you look from your car and then just keep moving if all you see are bright plastic kid’s toys and piles of baby clothes.  We hadn’t gotten much yet when we came across an alley sale where the proprietors flagged us in.  They had a parking spot all ready for us and no customers, which made us a little nervous.  As I strolled into their garage, I saw Mary already standing over a pile of something with a look of pure disbelief on her face.  This was the find of the day for sure!  A whole pile of vintage cameras.

The story that went with them was priceless.  The seller’s mother had been a camera collector.  When she passed away, the seller had sold two big boxes of cameras to an antiques dealer and she thought that was all of them.  But while cleaning out the closet to get ready for her garage sale, she came across a third box that she didn’t know she had, so she threw them out for the sale.

Holy garbanzo beans batman!  Just look at them!  Clearly it was fate!

So many cool cameras!  Some for Mary’s collection, and some for mine.

The fun did not end there folks!  I had all but given up on finding great furniture at garage sales this year, but this time I came home with this gorgeous bed.

And a fab pink dresser.

I love the green and white on this wooden melon crate, and found an awesome green jar, a green McCoy planter and a pretty little ironstone pitcher.

Mary purchased this fabulous ceramic hand at my urging.  It will make a great place to hang her jewelry once it’s mounted on the wall.  She also picked up some art supplies.

And last of all, I hope you didn’t miss Uncle Leon’s suitcase!

Yep, the gals that sold me the suitcase said it belonged to their Uncle Leon and he used to travel with it all the time.

You know it was a good day when a fab suitcase gets barely mentioned at the end!

What can I say?  Garage sales can be very hit or miss, but every once in a while you hit the jackpot!