Saturday, January 14, 2012

Shopping for bargains is my idea of fun

I have fun hunting for bargains, I have a few regular stores that I check on a daily basis, and I am always on the hunt for new ones. I love the hunt for the bargain and I love the rush when I find it. I have a strict budget right now and I have been holding off on large purchases because we plan to move back to Ontario soon. And saying that i have had to walk away from some incredible finds in this last month. But today I found an upholstered rocking chair that i had to buy, I paid 30 dollars for it. When you look at the picture you will see why I could not resist it, especially at that price. It will be an great match for the settee I bought in the summer and have plans on working on it more in Ontario. The settee needs to be stripped down to the bare bones and painted and reupholstered and i just don't have the room to do it here.I started to strip it down and it has layers and layers of fabric and a million nails, each time they reupholstered they used more nails. I don't know if I want to strip down the wood or paint it. Until we get into our house and I know where it is going to go and what colour scheme the room will be, I have to hold off on refinishing it. I think these two pieces would look great together, I will have to hunt for an amazing fabric to cover these two items. But I think when they are done they will look fantastic and i hope i will have the perfect place for them in our new home.




Thursday, January 12, 2012

Selling my wares

I am always looking for ways to sell my wares, be it either online, flea markets, or local stores. I was lucky to find a store that rents out space very cheap. I enjoy setting up at flea markets in the summer and meeting people and selling my stuff, but in the winter the crowds die off at this flea market and my time is too valuable to sit and not sell anything. I continue to sell a lot of my large items online but now I also have an area where I can sell my small items. For 30 dollars a month I have a space in a very popular thrift store that gets lots of traffic. I hope when we move back to Ontario to have my own space to sell my stuff, but in the meantime this works for me. I have also decided to set up an account on ebay to sell my finds, ebay is like opening up a store and 19 million people showing up to shop there, you can not get better traffic than that. It may take sometime to get it set up, but I will update on my progress.
In the meantime I have found some amazing sites and blogs of people that are lucky enough to already be doing what i hope to do when we move back to Ontario. I found a blog of a woman who has yearly sales at her farm and sets up in her barn and has vendors set up their tents on her property. Her yearly barnsales are a big hit for her to sell her products and a big hit for her vendors as well. This woman has 6 kids and she manages to do all of this, farm, sew, take care of her family and run a successful business. If she can do all that with everything else she has to do, I can surely do it with just a man child and dog child to care for. I long for the day that I can do this, I may not have a barn to set up in, would be nice, but at this point I would settle for a large tent. She decorates her barn for these sales with unique lighting and food and drinks for her customers and displays all of her products like they were rooms in a home. This blog has inspired me and give me a lot of great ideas, I can not wait to put them into action. Here is the name of her site for you too check it out www.nadafarms.com.
I have been researching alot of the china that I have accumulated to be able to price it either for sale or for me to keep and know its history or worth. It has been really time consuming, one day I spent the whole day in my jammies looking at china patterns and markings. I have found most of the items online, some patterns I could not find. A few of the china pieces i inherited from our purchases at the antique auction and some I bought a local thrift stores. The older pieces i have chosen to keep and have marked them so my children will know their value and to keep them in the family and pass them down. If my treasured items end up in thrift stores or my children sell them, i have threatened to come back and haunt them forever. I hope this has put fear in them and they will keep my treasures and value them as much as I do.
I love objects that are scrapped and beaten and chipped, these things take me back in time and I never tire of looking at them. I wonder about their history and the life they had before I was lucky enough to find them.

Friday, January 6, 2012

The January Blahs



Well the Christmas decorations are down and the season has come to an end, the house looks bare without all the lights and decorations. I have been sorting through all the decorations new and old and carefully packing them away for another year. I hope the next time i use these decorations it will be in our new home in Ontario. Oh how I long for my own home, where I can do whatever I please, paint walls, decorate to my liking, plant as many flowerbeds I want anywhere I want. I plan our new home room by room, how i would like it to look the things I want to do, the colours I will choose for each room. I like to imagine where all my unique finds will fit in our new home. I can't wait to give them a permanent spot and add to them once we are settled. The home I imagine in my dreams always has a front porch or a wrap around porch. The other day I found a unique set of wicker rocking chairs perfect for front porch rocking. I said I wasn't going to make anymore big furniture purchases, because it is just more stuff to haul back to Ontario, but these were a great deal and I love them. I went to an estate sale the other day too and picked up three colanders, two from the 1820's and one from the 1950's, the woman also had an old telephone or call box, it has numerous lines, so i don't think it was a phone used in homes, I will have to research it some more and find out what it was used for. My projects are on hold for now because I have no place to work on them, the basement is crammed with everything i am packing up to take home to sell. and the garage is also full of stuff packed away and hubby's motorcycle. so i guess I have to wait till spring to do anymore painting, stripping or sanding. Its hard for me not to be working on anything right now because i always seem to have a project on the go. I guess i will have to use this time to sort through everything and pack for our move back to ontario. We are hoping that we will be back by summer and i hope we will be in our new home this summer. I can't wait to have my own garage to work on all of my projects and start working on my plan to have my own business. If we get a place with a little bit of land I would love to build my own shop to display my wares and a large yard to hold antique sales and flea markets. hopefully someday soon...................