I’ve lived in our town for 30 years, and for most of those years there was a 10-acre cow pasture with a historic home right in the middle of town. It was a joy to drive past and see the cows every day. A few years ago we went to the estate sale at the big yellow historic home, it was built on the foundation of a log cabin and the home itself looked like it hadn’t been updated since the 1940s. The kitchen cupboards were original, and the wallpaper peeling off the kitchen walls was definitely 1940s vintage! The lady who lived there used to be out tending her flowers when I would drive by, but finally she got too old to live by herself and had to go to a retirement home. The granddaughter told us that in the 1940s the lady and her husband had divorced, and he got the lower 10 acres while she got the upper. The lower 10 acres is a park.
We knew the family would probably sell the property, but I always hoped that the city would buy the property to add to the park down below. I think if the city had been smart they would have anticipated the eventual sale of the property and would have set some money aside, but then I don’t know how city budgets work. Our town has few remaining historic buildings and spaces, so I thought it would be great to keep the space as it was.
The old home was torn down and the cows relocated, and then the property sat empty for a couple of years. This winter they finally started building apartments on the property. Ugh. The last thing this city needs is more apartments, and I doubt they will be “affordable”. While I don’t begrudge the family their inheritance, I wish they could have gotten it another way.
“Progress”. Hmph. 😒
(They are going to put a cow statue in the roundabout next to the property to commemorate the history of the place. So that will be nice.)
I snapped these photos quickly as I was driving by. It’s a shame to lose all that green space. And the traffic certainly won’t improve!
“Ladies and Gentlemen, when you hear the Shadow’s blood-curdling laugh, you can be sure that exciting entertainment will follow!”
A few weeks ago I brought home some audiocassettes from Mom and Dad’s. I was telling the Son-in-Law about this Old Time Radio’s Greatest Mysteries cassette set from from the 1930s and ’40s and he expressed interest in hearing them at some point, so I got out my cassette player and some other old radio show cassettes I have, including Fibber McGee and Molly, The Shadow, and Sherlock Holmes!
I found these Agatha Christie audiobook cassettes at Mom and Dad’s as well, they are Miss Marple stories read by one of the actresses who played Miss Marple (the best one, in my opinion).
I got this tape at an estate sale.
I’m looking forward to listening to all of these!
“The weed of crime bears bitter fruit. Crime does NOT pay. The Shadow knows…”
I spent this last week at Mom and Dad’s staying with Mom while Dad traveled down to a reunion in his small hometown in California.
I drove Mom to dialysis in Salem three days, and during those days I needed to figure out what I wanted to do with the four-hour time between drop-off and pickup. I had noticed that the St. Vinnie’s thrift store was across from the dialysis center and thought some thrifting time would be in order, so I went across to the St. Vinnie’s and found a great deal on some old Nancy Drew and Dana Girls (like Nancy Drew but with sisters) books — 1930s books WITH the original dust jackets in very good condition for only $3.49 apiece! I also got some Sue Grafton books, a couple by Aaron Elkins, another mystery writer, and a 1940s Mary Poppins book. I had planned to go to some other thrift stores in the area but decided to go home to eat and get something I forgot to bring with me.
Most of the time at the house I spent with Mom in the living/dining room watching HGTV and Hallmark Christmas movies. We find the movies very predictable and Mom has seen most of them, but she still likes to watch them. It’s not so bad to have a day full of happy endings! I set up all my things on the dining room table, I pretty much just brought my desk (computer, calendar, books, etc.) and then set up a charging station on the buffet, ha. It is the house I grew up in (but remodeled) and I got to thinking about what will happen to it if Mom and Dad decide to move to town like the neighbors are doing. It will be hard to see it go out of the family, since Mom and Dad built it 48 years ago. The house is octagon-shaped, so very unusual. I forgot to get a photo of it.
On Friday when Mom was in dialysis, I went to the grocery store to get some things. Mom wanted a roast so I got two (BOGO!) although they weren’t the kind she wanted. I waited in the line that had a very big, very slow cashier-in-training. He also seemed to be a bagger-in-training and a coupon-reader-in-training, and the poor guy was sweating. He kept having to ask another cashier to come help him, but I think she really just wanted to talk to the man who represented a Medicare supplement insurance company! After buying groceries I decided to hit up two other thrift stores, the Salvation Army store and the Goodwill. The Salvation Army store doesn’t have a big selection in general, so I went to the book section. I seem to be on a book kick lately. The books at the Salvation Army store are not in any kind of order at all, so you just have to scan the shelves to see if anything pops out at you. I found all these books I was interested in at the Salvation Army and Goodwill (the Perry Mason and “E for Evidence” came from the Goodwill), so I was happy with my scanning job! The Goodwill at least has the books in category and “letter” order, but not completely alphabetical. There were so many people at the Goodwill I just left after perusing the book section.
After I picked Mom up from dialysis on Friday we went to Nancy Jo’s restaurant (Or Nancy’s, as I still stubbornly refer to it, since it was their original name. There was some copyright problem, so they changed it to Nancy Jo’s.) to get burgers, and Mom got onion rings. We drove home in one of those traffic-jams-for-no-reason on the freeway, there was no accident or any reason for a traffic slowdown but we crept along for miles before the traffic started moving shortly before our exit. Since Mom would have a hard time getting into my van, I’ve been driving her to town in her car. It is quite zippy and I have enjoyed driving it, although it feels like I’m going slower than I actually am so I need to pay close attention to the speedometer!
On Monday after I dropped Mom off I had to pick up some things I ordered online. I ordered these Christmas ornaments from Target to pick up at the store, but unfortunately there was only one left between both of our area stores. Isn’t it cute? Since The Hubs likes trucks and we are doing a black and white and blue theme for Christmas this year, I thought it was perfect. It will also go with red and black or pink and black themes. I do themes now instead of using our family and traditional ornaments because the ornaments and decorations have to be plastic or metal so Philip won’t hurt himself with them. He does try to get them off the tree and has knocked the tree over a couple of times by climbing up into it.
I also picked up some things I ordered at Ulta on Monday. The girl at the checkstand there had combed her eyebrows straight up and then penciled them in so it looked like she had really long, straight up eyebrows. I had to try hard not to stare. Is that a thing now? When I think of long eyebrows growing straight up I think of an old man, so I wondered why she wanted to look like a grandpa, ha. They do hire some of the most interesting-looking people at Ulta and many of them have what I would consider odd eyebrows, but then I really do prefer the natural look for brows. Eyes, go ahead and do ’em up! Lashes to the sky! But eyebrows, just pencil them in natural-like and not conspicuous. After Ulta, I went to TJ Maxx and bought all sorts of socks I really don’t need. ‘Tis the time of year when warm fluffy socks in the store seem so inviting!
Dad got home on schedule and right when the “bath girl” was finished helping Mom. We were glad he arrived safely. He had a good time at the reunion and visiting with my uncle and other friends.
I had a nice, relaxing visit taking care of Mom this week. I meant to work on some writing and reading and didn’t get to that, but that’s okay. I leave you with this photo of the view from Mom and Dad’s dining room deck.
As I mentioned in the bench results post, I recently brought this desk/dressing table to my house from Mom and Dad’s, and I needed to move it into the storage room.
Grandma’s dressing table.
In order to fit the desk into the storage room, I had to take almost everything out of one side of the room. There are two sides of the storage room, one for miscellaneous furniture, etc., and one for my hiking/backpacking/camping things and vintage treasures. I don’t have a photo of what the room looked like before I took everything out, but here’s what the bedroom looked like after I emptied the storage room into it:
A lot of stuff, and that isn’t even all of it.
Some things just got moved over to the other side of the storage room.
That’s Consuela the Mannequin. She helps me with my Etsy shop. The Sis-In-Law gave me the giant bag of packing peanuts.
I keep a lot of empty boxes to ship my Etsy items. They take up about 1/3 of the room. I have many ceramic Christmas village houses selling on Etsy that will need the large boxes to ship them.
Here is what the storage room looked like when I got most of the stuff out of that one side and after we moved the desk in. We bought one of those 4-wheeled furniture dollies at Harbor Freight and rolled it in on that, and then just left the desk on top of it.
I like empty frames, as you can see by this frame wall in my office.
I bought many of the frames below at an antique mall in Aurora, Oregon, that was having a parking lot sale. They were all $1.00 and $2.00 apiece, which is ridiculously cheap. I bought most of the pile at the sale. Some of the others I got at the Mama Roost yard sale and they were ridiculously inexpensive as well. In order to fit everything back into the storage room, the frames had to go upstairs to a newly cleared spot in the hall. (The upstairs “hall” is also a storage area.) I didn’t realize how much space they actually take up.
I like frames.
The Hubs suggested putting the old door on top of the desk (with a carpet remnant under it). That allowed more space to put things on top of the desk. The door came off a “shed” that was in our yard when we moved into this house. In order to build the shop, the shed had to come down, as the city only allows 600 square feet of outbuildings total on a property. Now, if you attach your shop to the house you can go as big as you want, but The Hubs didn’t want to take the chance that his welding would burn the house down. The door still has both doorknobs and the robe hook. I think it might have been one of the original doors to the house, as there is one just like it that they used for the upstairs bathroom. The doors in the rest of the main house seem to be from the 1970s when the house was remodeled.
I gradually moved the rest of the things in:
Finished product.
You’ve probably noticed that I also like tall vintage lamps. Well, lamps in general. Someday I will have a place to use them. This is my OTHER bag of packing peanuts. I have enough for quite a lot of shipping. And I have enough boxes as well. I have over 100 things for sale on Etsy right now, plus bins of things that aren’t even listed yet, so I need to have a variety of boxes for shipping. I wish I had some sort of box closet so they wouldn’t have to be in the storage room, but that won’t happen until The Girl moves out and I can move half the stuff up to her room, ha.
I was happy that I did the whole job in just a couple of hours and was feeling all proud of myself and everything, until later I remembered that the mirror to the dressing table was left behind the cedar chest in our bedroom. Arrgh! Now I have to move things out again to find a place for the mirror so it won’t get broken. Can’t have a dressing table without a mirror!
After church today I put on my painting clothes and went out to dry brush the bench. I chose a small and not very fluffy paintbrush and used a door and trim paint by Sherwin Williams called Whitetail. (I forgot to take a photo of the can.) It’s the same color of the walls in our kitchen and laundry room.
I dipped the paintbrush just barely into the paint, scraped the paint off on the sides of the paint can, and then dabbed it on a paper towel to get most of the paint off for the dry brush look.
Dry brushing technique.
Then I brushed the paintbrush back and forth lightly over the bench. There were a couple of spots where I got a bit too much paint on, but I started on the back of the bench to make sure I knew what I was doing before I got around to the front, so most of those don’t show.
It really brings out the wood grain.
Finally, here is the finished bench in the sun:
And in its place on the back porch:
I think it needs a pumpkin and a pot of fall mums…and it looks a lot neater in person.
The Girl, Marnie, and The Hubs (in that order) have all approved of the bench, yay!!! It will look better after the house is painted, whenever that happens.
No more painting projects for awhile, it’s on to work-work and writing for me, along with rearranging the storage room so we can put my grandma’s desk/dressing table/mirror in there with its matching head/footboard and dresser. It is in the waterfall style, probably from the 1940s. When Grandma passed away in 1992 the bed and dresser came to live with me, but I didn’t have room for the dressing table and little bench. It has finally come (with some dead spiders) to my house after 30 years in Mom and Dad’s garage. Dad needed the space for a worktable.
Grandma’s Dressing Table (Excuse everything else in the photo. It is our laundry room/furnace space.)
The dressing table and its siblings will probably need to be painted someday unless I can get someone to refinish them. Right now I don’t have the skills to do it properly, but I suppose I could learn. The wood is so pretty it would be a shame to cover it up!
I’m sure I’ll post something about the storage room clearout as I’m going through. Cleaning out and rearranging = good fun!!
I got this vintage Fisher Price Little People music box ferris wheel for just $1.00 at the jumble sale I went to last weekend. I could tell it was in good condition, it was just filthy. Here it is just after I bought it:
Ew.Blargh.
But here it is now:
And here it is in action:
The song is the chorus of “In the Good Old Summertime” and the lyrics are as follows:
In the good old summer time, In the good old summer time, Strolling through the shady lanes With my baby mine. You hold her hand and she holds yours And that’s a very good sign That she’s your tootsie wootsie In the good old summer time.
George Evans and Ren Shields
The song comes from the 1949 movie “In the Good Old Summertime”.
There were a few spaces with dirt on the ferris wheel that I couldn’t get to with a Q-Tip. I have some long cotton swabs somewhere, I think, but couldn’t find them. It is much better than it was though, and all the important parts are nice now. Amazing what a simple wet rag and some elbow grease can do! Don’t you just love to see something dirty come clean? 😃
On Friday we didn’t hike since I was leading a hike for the ladies from church at Willamette Mission Park on Saturday, so I went to some sales and found all sorts of wonderful things!
The first sale started at 8:00 a.m. and was one of those sales where you rummage through piles. Here are some of the things I found:
Vintage Tupperware that can be sold on Etsy.
See the blue scoop in the photo above? I have a clear one that was my mom’s that I keep in the sugar canister. The Hubs has strict instructions never to throw it away because you can’t get them anymore and it is just perfect for scooping sugar into a measuring cup. There were two of them at this sale! Unfortunately when I got them home I realized the orange one had a big crack in it and won’t be usable, but finding one is still a huge win!
Croquet balls in very nice condition.This picture I got for Marnie’s daughter, Aryn. She likes Japanese things. I don’t know if this is Japanese or Chinese, but I’m sure she will know. If she doesn’t want it, it was only $1.00!Vintage Myrtlewood nut bowlVintage (my vintage!) Fisher Price Little People Music Box Ferris Wheel. It definitely will need some elbow grease to get clean, but is in great condition otherwise and works fine.From 1916, a pre-teen/teen book. Classic Christmas songs. Yes, I still have a CD player in my van.
I went to a couple of other sales where I found…ahem…a vintage tall lamp. Because I…erm…collect them. This one is shorter than the others, more of a lamp you would put by a reading chair. It’s probably from the 1940s.
New vintage lamp. Note doorstop kitty that looks just like real kitty.
The South Salem Senior Center was having its annual rummage sale, and it was the most organized sale ever! I didn’t realize they had such a large space. Every room was filled with all sorts of things for sale. I found these for a very good price:
1970s (I think) Shiny Brite ornaments.Vintage postal scale.Books for me. I collect etiquette books, enjoy reading Sue Grafton, and may give the Bible away since I have a daily chronological Bible.
Then I went to The Thrift Store here in Keizer and what do you think I found? This Oregon State University Columbia fleece in the right size for just $10.00! These sell for $40 or $50 in the store, and this is practically new and even has zipper pockets! Now I have something to wear if I’m ever invited to a football game at OSU, or I could just wear it on game day in solidarity. I did go to OSU for a couple of years and consider it my alma mater.
I got some other things as well, and my house now looks like a tornado hit it! I will definitely be spending some of today tidying. 😁
Yesterday Marnie and I went on an adventure in the countryside around Molalla and Silverton, Oregon, and saw and bought some fun stuff. We started at the Hometown Barnhouse Vintage Market, and then went on to some estate sales and antique stores. At the vintage market I got an old Nancy Drew book and an old Hardy Boys book to add to our collection and an old strainer with a green handle to hang on my kitchen wall. I have a collection of vintage kitchen utensils with green handles, because my kitchen has a green theme. Marnie was able to find some nice plant pots for her growing succulent collection.
The countryside.Friday’s haul
At a barn sale, I got the tray above and a beautiful mirror with beveled edges in a dark wood frame. It belonged to a dresser at one time so there is nothing on the back to hang it with, but I’m hoping the Hubs will be able to come up with a solution so I can hang it in my office. This is the barn that had the sale, the man said it was built in 1908. It still seemed very solid.
Isn’t this the neatest?
He had a wonderful dresser for just $40, but I have nowhere to keep one.
I was talking to the man at the barn about the barn we used to play in when I was a girl and told him about the owls, and he showed us his barn owl. Marnie got this awesome photo of it.
Marnie gets the best photos.
We went to what used to be an antique mall in Molalla, but is now just a very small part of the building and the porch with a couple of small rooms inside. We were disappointed that they had downsized so much because we had enjoyed shopping there after our hikes when we were out that way.
At an estate sale in Silverton I found a few modern books that I’ve been interested in, so that was nice since they were only $1 and $2 apiece. I was just talking to Lara and Marnie about how I never seem to read anymore, so I bought more books…now there are at least 7 or 8 on my “To Read” list. I suppose I had better get started!
Part of the fun of going to estate sales is seeing the houses, and this one was no different. It was in a new neighborhood on a hill and looked like a small house from the front, but when you went inside it was a good size with a view of a good chunk of Silverton out the living room window.
We did follow some signs to a “hoarder’s sale” way out in the country, but the driveway was narrow and long and when we got up to the house there was nowhere to park, so we came back down and didn’t bother with that one.
We came into Silverton and went to a thrift store and then had strawberry milkshakes from the bakery and lunch we got at the food cart pod. Marnie had spring rolls and I got my lunch from the Costa Rican cart, enyucado and fried plantains. I had never had enyucado before and it was delicious. It is a fried croquette made of cassava, and was filled with ground beef and spices. I forgot to take a photo of it before, but here is a photo of it after I eated it. I brought most of the plantain fries home and The Girl expressed great interest in them so I may not get to eat them after all, ha.
The antique stores in Silverton didn’t have much that interested us, Marnie got a decoration for her succulent garden and I got an “Oregon” sticker to replace my “Onward” bear sticker which is peeling off the van window. I saw a sign like this at one of the stores and it was $22. I checked online and found it for $12.98. I was hoping to get a more artistic one, but after thinking about my stash of sign-making materials and looking at the price of stencils, I decided this one was fine. The Hubs has a nifty plasma table that will cut signs and things, but it isn’t working so he couldn’t make a sign for me. I will hang this on the fence in the front yard and hope no one runs off with it!
This last weekend I bought a few magazines from the 1940s. I’m kicking myself for not buying the whole pile, but hoping that the man will be at the flea market next month with the rest. I want the magazines because A) I love reading old magazines; B) Our house was built in 1946 and I’m interested in the history; and most importantly C) we have been re-doing our bathroom, and I’ve decided (I think) to decorate with travel ads from the 1940s. This is the cover of one of the magazines, which will be perfect for my travel theme. Seriously, you should have seen the giant grin on my face when I found it!
While looking through old magazines, I’m always struck by how similar the articles and content are to what we have today. For instance, I read an article about a lady who was a writer, and tired of trying to do her work in a space where she was constantly trampled by children, puppies, and tradespeople, decided to redo a cellar room into a study. She managed to do it for only $25, ($384.59 by today’s standards, according to The Inflation Calculator). Today, however, I saw this in a 1941 Better Homes and Gardens. The first two paragraphs read:
“There’s one sure way to tell a long-lasting paint. Find out how much white lead it contains. For as good painters and architects will tell you, the greater the white lead content, the more enduring the paint. And you can’t get a more weather-resistant paint than one containing 100% pure white lead.”
<Jaw drops to floor>
Little did they know, a few years later children would be seriously injured from eating bits of the paint that was not, I suppose, as durable as the ads wanted them to believe. Of course, 15 years ago people still thought margarine was better for you than butter. We just never know when our prevailing wisdom will turn to foolishness!
every day's just like starting over 