Idaho's Largest Garage Sale

On Saturday I had the time of my life at "Idaho's Largest Garage Sale". And that's no exaggeration. It was located in a huge parking lot where people could rent booth space and gather to sell their stuff in one massive yard sale. 3 friends and I arrived shortly after it opened at 7 and browsed for about 4 1/2 hours before we needed to head home- and we nearly didn't have time to see it all! Let me tell you what, I found a LOT of stuff. I felt bad turning my friends into furniture movers, but they were cheerful and willing to help me (thank goodness), so I was able to really stock up on items to refurbish.

Here are some photos of my thrifty companions shopping the massive yard sale.





Lucky for me one of my friends' husband loaned us his big truck for the day, and boy did we fill it up! I say "we", but I really mean "I". Everything in the photo below except the item Lindsay is removing and another bookcase buried in there is mine. Is that ridiculous? It probably looked like we were moving or something!

Anyway, here's what came home with me. (Some of the photos are blurred around the edges to hide some of the distracting mess in the background. I was in a hurry to get things put away and didn't bother staging my items at all.)

This sweet little ottoman will be recovered for my friend, Lindsay, who came to the sale. It doesn't look too bad in the photo, but believe me when I say that in person it's pretty nasty. The fabric is dirty and the whole thing STINKS! Oh, and I've never done button tufting before, so wish me luck on this one!

My first purchase of the day- a sweet little rush seat chair.

I love the natural distressed condition that this step stool is in. I hope I can find a way to protect it so the rest of the paint doesn't flake off and it can keep this very worn look that it has going on.

Doesn't this table look like the baby brother of my new living room side table? It's so adorable and only stands about 18" tall.

Got a pair of these cuties...

... a side table with a drawer...

... a side table without a drawer...

... a piano bench with some shapely legs...

... a pair of these cute but HEAVY chairs...

... and this dresser that needs a little repair but should be fine in the end.

I also got a few odds and ends like this tiny skateboard with its cool weathered look...

... this wooden display cabinet with a glass pane in front...

... a nice sized wooden shelf with pegs...

... and a brand new set of blocks that only cost me a buck because 2 are missing.

I just love the vintage look of these, but I think I want to find a way to make them look less new somehow.
I also got my kids a few things like some clothing, a vintage picture book and a Darth Vader voice-changer helmet (suh-weeeet!).

Overall, I think I did pretty well. But the one thing that really blew my skirt up, that got me utterly and completely giddy, the item that every time I look at it makes me excited and thrilled and tickled and stoked is....

this vintage wooden high chair!

I am in love with this thing. The weathered patina that it has just can't be duplicated, so I'm going to keep it.

Not going to paint it or stain it or anything, just clean it, maybe give it a light sanding then seal it.

I'll be sure and share the finished product with you soon. I'm going shopping for just the right sealer tomorrow!
I'd say I couldn't have spent my Saturday any better. My company was fantastic, I was doing something I enjoy and I came home with LOTS of stuff to bring back to life.

A HUGE thank you to those who spent the morning with me and made it so much fun! And then helped me get everything I bought picked up from vendors, taken out to the truck, loaded in the truck, tied down, driven home then unloaded at my house.

Little blue table

Oh, boy, did I have quite the adventure this weekend! I'll be writing up a post all about it shortly, but here's a peek at something that came home with me to entice you to check back.

Just look at that awesome patina! What could it be? A chair? A bench? A table? A stool? (And if you know, don't tell, okay?)
Heehee! I'm craaaaazy excited about this, too, so don't miss the reveal later this week!

In the meantime, I wanted to show you the newest addition to our living room. Unfortunately, it's not my lovely coffee table . It's not quite done. At least I don't think it is. Maybe it is. Or not. I JUST DON'T KNOW! The truth is, I don't know if I ought to do a little more to it to give it some more character, or just leave it the heck alone!

Well, until I figure it out, here's another little table who has taken up residence in our newly reorganized living room.

I totally love this table.

Here's what it looked like, fresh from the thrift store.
Bleh.
NEVER would have thought this would end up having a place in my house.
The little rails on top got knocked off, the holes filled and then the whole thing primed and painted in a happily accidentally perfect shade of blue.

Then I attacked it with my sander and showed now mercy.

A little walnut stain rubbed on the edges...

... and I have a sweet, worn looking little side table to go between my wooden arm chair and rocker (which may be getting made over shortly as well).

When I brought it in from the garage after it was all done, my face was glowing with pride and I wore a grin from ear to ear. I asked my hubby what he thought and his response was, "It doesn't hurt my feelings." Good enough for me! :) Then today I had a friend come by and she told me how much she loves it, too, so I now know that I'm not alone in my admiration for this little blue darling.

Glossy black furniture

Just wanted to pop in and share a couple of photos of the group of black and red furniture I did for my friend.

Don't those two little wooden chairs look adorable with the bench? Each piece was found seperately, but paintin them the same color makes them look like they belong together.

Add some pillows to tie into the bench cushions, and a pop of red with the side table and you've got a pretty snazzy little set up, don'tcha think?

Rachel's table & my happy, lucky super score

Remember my lucky-duck friend Rachel that scored that amazing bench at a thrift store and handed it over to me for a face lift? Here's a picture of the finished bench to refresh your memory.

Well, friend Rachel spied a few other pieces that I've picked up and had me redo them to go with her shiny new bench.

This little night stand/side table is the last of her projects that just got completed. Here's what it looked like when I grabbed it from the thrift store.
Rachel brought me a can of the paint she wanted me to use, as well as a new pull for the drawer. Here's the table coated in the glossy burgundy paint (even though it looks kind of red in these photos.)

And here it is all done.


Rachel wanted some black on this piece, so I distressed it a bit then used a glaze (sometimes called "antiquing") on it.






If you're interested in learning how to do this treatment, there's a simple tutorial given here that is very clear and concise. I hope to be able to post photos of this along with the other items I did for her, arranged in her home, once I deliver them.

And now to show you my super lucky thrifty find that had me doing a happy dance all day. Okay, this weekend my husband and I rearranged the furniture in our house. Rearranged as in, we moved a giant 8 foot sofa and a huge love seat and a solid, heavy TV console upstairs and brought another sofa and enormous armoire downstairs, plus a couple of other smaller things.

It was major work. Our stairs go up, hit a little landing, then turn and go up the opposite direction.
It was really hard.
I perspired.
I was sore.
We gouged the walls with our giant furniture trying to negotiate the corner on those stairs, but we did it.
Here's a look around our living room before the shuffling began. (Sorry again for the lousy photos.)


Now, here's a peek at what our living room looked like this morning.
We no longer want it to be the hangout room because it's the room you walk into upon entering the house, and keeping it picked up was next to impossible with the kids' toys always being strewn around and such. So we moved the TV up to our bonus room and plan to use this room as sort of a quiet little spot to chat with guests or read.

Okay, on to what prompted this whole story. After moving out the big couch and love seat, I felt like the huge brown table/ottoman just didn't fit anymore. I wanted a coffee table. I real, wooden coffee table. I envisioned something rectangular with turned legs and a simple top, a lot like this table that I re-did for another friend.


Over the weekend I went to a few thrift stores, stalked Craigslist and today went to a few more thrift stores while the kids I ran errands. But I just wasn't finding what I wanted. I decided to check one last place downtown that I'd only ever been to once, but upon arriving found that they're not even open on Mondays.
Bummer.
As I backed out, ready to give up for the day, I had second thoughts and decided to visit the place next door. It's this weird, junky kind of store that has just stuff piled on top of stuff piled on top of stuff clear up to the ceiling. The aisles are about 18" wide and there's just so much that you really have to look hard to find anything. The one time I went in before I spotted some cute stuff but they were usually overpriced (in my opinion).

I briskly made my way around, stopping here and there to look closer at this or that, and soon found myself in the back corner of the store. As I turned to start heading out again I spotted the leg of something that looked like what could be a coffee table. But it was buried under piles of blankets and other stuff. Once I got the blankets off I knew immediately that this was what I wanted. It was perfect! Even better was that the price tag said $29.99 and not something completely out of my price range, which would have been heartbreaking. I admit, it wasn't a steal of a deal, but being that it was exactly what I was looking for, I was more than happy to pay it. So I asked the nice lady up front to help me unearth it and I hauled my treasure happily home. If I were capable of doing a back flip I probably would have.


It's just a really sturdy, substantial pine table with the turned legs I wanted and kind of a plank look to the top, and the scale is much better for the sofa that's in here now.





But it won't look like this for long. Ooooh, no. I have a vision. This is the perfect piece to do that painted legs, stained top treatment that I talked about. So imagine the legs painted ivory, distressed then glazed with dark brown to make them really pop, then the top stained a nice rich walnut color.
Yeah?
Oh, I can't WAIT!

Tutorial: Vintage-looking painted sign from salvaged wood

Today I have a little tutorial for you. I'm going to show you how to (easily!) make these sweet wooden signs. I promise- they're a cinch, they don't take long at all to make and cost pretty much nothing.




You will need:
piece of salvaged wood
upholstery tacks or short nails (optional)
hammer
acrylic paint (background color)
black acrylic paint (or other color to fill in letters)
large paint brush
small paint brush
ink jet printer
twine
Sharpie Marker or other dull, rounded tool

This project started with a pile of cedar fence pieces that we've had sitting in our backyard for ages. My husband had just loaded a good portion of them into our chiminea to be burned when I got the idea for these signs and was able to save them from becoming ash.

I loved how grey and weathered they had become from sitting outside. Start by lightly sanding your piece of wood if it's too rough, or just wiping it off to remove any dirt or other loose particles.

Next, distress the wood to your liking. I hammered a few upholstery tacks into the corners, added a couple of empty nail holes then banged on it with the claw of my hammer. In the photo below the top piece is untouched and the bottom one has been beaten. Poor thing.



Next, choose your paint. Most home improvement stores sell miss-tinted paints for very cheap, so during one of my visits to the Home Depot I picked up this little sample pot of pretty blueish gray paint for .50. Sweet! After experimenting with different paints while makig these signs, I've found that the less sheen the paint has, the better. Cheap acrylic craft paint works best, flat latex paint like the kind I used here is next best. DON'T bother with spray paint- your letters won't transfer well at all.
(I wasn't really sure if I was going to be doing a tutorial for this or not until I was finished, so I'm afraid I'm missing a few photos for some of the steps. Don't worry. It will make sense anyway.)

After you've properly dented and nicked your piece of wood to perfection and added your tacks or nails, take your large , dry paint brush and get a little paint on it. Wipe off any excess on the lip of your paint can and sweep your paint lightly over the wood. You're not going for a perfect paint job here. In fact, you want it to be as imperfect as possible without it looking like you were trying to make it imperfect, if that makes any sense. And don't bother painting the sides, just the front.

Once you're happy with the paint, put the wood aside to dry and head to your computer. Choose a word and a font that you want on your sign and enlarge it to a size that will fit on the piece of wood that you have. Flip it so it's backwards and print.

I used Adobe Photoshop to print my backwards words using the "Rotate Canvas" feature under Image, then clicking on "Flip Horizontal". If you're using another software program like Microsoft Word, it might be a little trickier. Check the already submitted comments to see if you can find something that works, or check out this link that I found that explains how to either flip the text using your printer's functions, or in Word itself. It seems like kind of an involved process, but I tried it with my older version of Word and it worked.

Go back to your wood and rinse the paintbrush you just used, but don't worry about getting the brush dry.

Turn your piece of paper over so that the ink is face down on your wood, position it so that it's centered (I like to crease the bottom of my paper along the edge of the wood so it doesn't move around) and begin brushing the paper with your wet paintbrush.

You don't want to make your paper sopping wet or the ink will just run and the paper will disintegrate. Just wet it enough so that it seeps through to the other side and starts to release the ink from the paper.

Take your Sharpie lid and begin to burnish your letters going horizontally and vertically. You want to transfer as much of the ink from the paper to the wood as you can. Don't peek, though. You don't want to accidentally shift your paper. Just scribble over each letter being sure you've burnished over every bit of each one.

Here's what it should look like when you're done. You could leave it like this if you want it to be really faded looking, or...

... you can go back with your small paint brush and fill in the letters a little with some very, very diluted black paint.

Once you've finished with the word, distress the sign a little more with some sandpaper, taking off some of the paint along the edges and swiping it over the word a bit to make it look more aged and authentic.

Finally, nail or staple twine to the back of your wood to act as a hanger for your new, old-looking sign.

I used some of my favorite foods for the signs I made for my kitchen and I just adore them. The "cocoa" sign was the very first one I did, and as you can see I was more deliberate when filling in the letters with paint than I was with the others. I like the faded look of the other ones more, so I'll go back and sand it a little so that it matches them better.



Here are a couple more signs that need their twine hangers nailed on before they make the trip to the consignment store. I plan on making several more using other colors of paint and maybe even other colors of ink! Wouldn't it be cute to have a little white-washed board with the word "apples" painted on it in red? I haven't tried using other colors of ink yet, but I don't know why it wouldn't work just as well as the black.

Don't limit yourself to food items when thinking of words to put on these signs. You could hang these above a bedroom door and paint the child's name on them, or your favorite inspirational word or scripture reference, or a simple word like "family" or "home" or "welcome". There's really no limit to where these could go in your house. I might just have to make another "soap" one for my laundry room.

One final added note: these signs can be made for outdoor use!  Just brush, wipe or spray with a polyurethane finish to seal and protect them from the elements.

Anyway, I hope you enjoyed the tutorial, and that you can salvage some wood to create a custom sign for your home!

P.S. I'm linking to Frugal Friday on











EDIT: I apologize for taking so long to answer this question, but a few of you have wondered if an ink jet printer or a laser printer is required. I have a cheap old ink jet, which is what I used for this project. I have no idea if a laser printer would produce an image that would transfer using this method. Anyone tried it?