Treasure Hunting

  It is full on rummage sale season around here.  The not so great part is that the big rummage sale days in my town are days that I work.  Fortunately, I wind up with a few hours to kill in town each week.  And sometimes when I'm really lucky, there is a sale close to my work that I can check out on my lunch break.  It has been a good couple of weeks of thrifting.

There are so many things I love about rummaging/thrifting.  I love to look for unique things.  Maybe they were very average household items in their day, maybe they're a one of a kind creation..  I like to take these things and give them another life in our home.

While overly theme-y canned decor isn't my thing, I think I have come to have a more defined style.  I know what I like and what I don't.  This is a huge help when trying to find an item for a certain function. I like certain styles of things, so I no longer buy the first cheap thing I find.  I wait until I find one that I'm going to want to look at every day. As you can see, I kind of have a thing for enamelware and vintage linens.

I've been wanting a vintage kitchen scale for quite a while.  Every so often, I need to measure produce by weight, and it would be nice to have a measurement when packaging meat, instead of just eyeballing what is a pound.  I found this snazzy one for $15.  This is the highest ticket item I've bought in a long time, but so worth it.  I got the cute little beehive that is sitting up on it for $1.25 at the same shop.  I just love that place. 

Sorry this isn't the best picture.  Oddly,
this was a hard thing to photograph.

The purchase of the scale led to a total revamp of my kitchen storage situation.  See, it didn't really fit on my counter like I had hoped it would, so I had to come up with plan B.  Plan B turned into clearing the top of our fridge, cleaning it (you know how they get that weird gunk on them), and putting out some of my other items that had been stored in a cabinet and moving the other stuff to the cabinet.  The top of the fridge has been a real eyesore forever.  I have no idea why I didn't do this about five years ago.  This concept isn't original.  Obviously I'm not the only person who decorates the top of their fridge with this kind of stuff, but it is actually very functional.  And, it looks a lot better than having our lunch pails and electric griddle up there.  This just makes me smile when I walk by it.  Best of all, I spent next to nothing to put this together.  All this stuff was either a gift or was purchased at rummage sales or thrift shops. Oh wait, I lied.  See that wooden jobbie the squirrel basket is sitting on, that's from The Pampered Chef.  It is a stand for mounting an apple peeler.  It was taking up space in the cabinet, so I decided it could be a stool for Matt's squirrel basket (yes it is my husband's basket.  It was a cheeky birthday gift from his sister).  Even though its all pretty up there, it is still the place where our bread goes and where we stash the candy away from little hands.

This nifty little dish is a piece of vintage Pyrex.  It originally had a ribbed glass top and was part of their refrigerator collection.   I found it at Goodwill.  No lid, but I liked the size and color of it so I got it anyway.  It is a great place to keep the plug for my sink and my scrubbies.

This apron was too cute to pass up.  It was 99 cents at Goodwill.  I bought it a while ago and wasn't sure what to do with it.  Lucky for me, Dion gave me a great idea to hang it on a vintage hanger.  We found this gem the on the same treasure hunt as the scale.  It has an advertisement on it for the E.R. Moore Company in Chicago and set me back a buck and a half.  They hang in the laundry room.  Don't they look cheerful?

It has been great to have all my little treasures find homes. Finding cool stuff is only part of the fun.  Figuring out just how its going to fit in the house is the real adventure.  Its even better when one item brings together a display of stuff that has otherwise gone unseen.

Have you found any treasures lately?

The Runaway Rooster

Friday night I went to shut the chicken coop and noticed that our rooster was missing.  I looked all over thinking that he was accidentally locked up in the garage or something. When I couldn't find him, I started to feel guilty that I left the door open too long and turned my  chickens into a drive through meal for a hungry critter.  Thinking that he had come to an untimely end, I went to bed feeling a bit sad.

I woke up Saturday morning hoping to see him pecking around in the yard.  I didn't see him, but I did hear him.   Looking like some kind of vagrant, I set out in yesterday's clothes rattling a bucket of corn.   I walked down the road and came up our back trail and still hadn't seen him.  Then I heard him again and followed the sound to the neighbor's boat shed.  With the T-Roy the rooster located and safe, I headed home to get Matt and some tools.

A bit later, we set off down the road.  Natalie on her bike, Joey wearing his "fire tiger" boots (Natalie's old neon rainbow cheetah print rubber boots which he is positive are really boys boots), me pulling the wagon with a cat carrier and a fishing net in it and Matt walking along beside me with his big gloves on, we really were a sight to behold.  It was a regular parade.

It felt a bit like being in a Ray Stevens song.  "So there I was" with a fish net in my hands, chasin' a runaway rooster around the neighbor's yard.  Two adults and two small children running around in circles after a ten pound chicken for the better part of an hour.  At one point, he hid under the porch and needed the persuasion of a water hose to come out.  I bet the neighbor felt like he got front row seats at the circus.

In the end, we gave a wet rooster a wagon ride home and returned him to his coop full of waiting hens.  The story has a happy ending, but I have to say that this really not how I expected to start my long weekend.