Early American Yard Sale - Part 2

We bought a fixer-upper of a house in a town where few people wanted to live because of the isolation and the lack of amenities.

For a long while after we moved into this house we painted and decorated inside, trying to bring faded and aged and dirty creme walls to life with new color and texture.

Between what we had, what we found, what we repurposed and what we bought used from a multitude of sources, we succeeded (although there are still projects to do) in making the inside comfortable.

Both LC and I knew that we would very quickly need to do something with the outside of the house.

The building was constructed in painted wood siding over cinder block, and the siding was in very rough shape.

The cheapest option was to paint, and so we painted.

And painted.

And painted.

In some kind of weird color that I cannot remember the name of off hand, but which looks sometimes light brown, sometimes sage green, and sometimes medium grey depending on the light and the time of day.

LC rolled, and I used a brush to paint the hundreds of lines that were on the siding.  

So many lines so little time.  

Lines to the left of me, lines to the right, here I am stuck in the middle with you.  

Lines?  I got a million of 'em.

Lines enough to get tendinitis.

The back of the house was in the worst condition and it took three coats.  The rest of the house took two, and now it is almost done but not quite.

There are still..........more lines.  Lines very high and that will require a tall ladder and a good deal of initiative and balance.

Fewer lines that are low, that my question mark shaped back could no longer handle after spending too much time day after day hunched over.

Once a lot of the painting had been done LC and I began to cut and stain new wood and replace all of the frames around the windows.  

The frames look great but only serve to highlight the really old and ugly windows, and the really old and ugly screens that are complete with dust, the odd paint stain from the previous owners, and don't forget the odd pieces of scotch tape haphazardly placed over holes.

Nobody who ever lived in this house ever cared whether they over-sprayed, used a brush to inadvertently over-paint, used scotch tape to cover a screen hole.

Once most of the painting was done and most of the window frames were replaced, we got the bright idea to cut and stain more lumber and replace all the chipped and gnarly (and sometimes rotted) corner posts around the house.

Over the span of a very long week we moved from peeling and faded yellow house to a beige-sage-grey house.

And we moved from ugly, industrial brown window frames (LC and I joked that it was probably the only color paint the previous owners could steal un-noticed from the Secret Squirrel Lab) to stained natural wood frames.

There is still more to do.  

But the exterior looks a lot better, is structurally sounder, and will hold up (without the need for replacement) for a few years.

The exterior still needs prettying up though.

What to do.......what to do..........to make it look homier and welcoming and not such a blank canvas?

Not sure yet, but I'll figure it out..................

The house we lived in up in Juneau was 30 miles from town in an area known locally as "Out the Road".

One day I was walking close to home with our sweet dog Jamie and passed by a pile of junk that one of the local residents had haphazardly thrown at the end of his driveway.

This weather-worn paddle was laying half-hidden in the pile.

Looking around me to make sure that no-one was watching, I walked closer to the pile and then bent down to take a closer look at the paddle.

Some of the yellow paint remained, but mostly the finish was gone.

Turning it over in my hands I realized that I really liked this dumper-diving find, and after knocking on the home owners door and getting the nod, I walked home with my new find

I never repainted it, but did oil it and now it hangs on the wall above the very heavy fireplace grate that I bought at a yard sale in Tennessee..............

The tall wooden owl, the cast iron horse head, and the old wood box (that contains old shaving gear) were all yard sale finds in Tennessee..................

Not long after me, my two boys and my second husband moved down to Tennessee I went to a yard sale and saw the two pewter goblets that are on the top shelf in this picture.

They were heavy, sturdy, smooth, hard feeling objects in my hand and I regarded them for a few minutes, drawn to them but not really knowing why.

It cost me $4 for the two of them and I drove home pleased with my unexpected find.

That was almost 20 years ago now, and in that time I have somehow managed to amass about 50 different pieces of pewter from yard sales and thrift stores.

They were all equally as cheap as my first two mugs, and I have no idea whether any of them are old and actually worth any money or if they're all just junk.

It doesn't really matter.  They look nice on shelves and they please me.

The fact that they are indestructible has been an added bonus over these past years of moving far too far and far too wide...............

A wolf print from Tennessee, a multi-purpose tool from Alaska, and a rock tool from Idaho..............

Another one of those collections that was unplanned and that developed seemingly out of nowhere.

Stoneware crocks are not difficult to find in the south, and I bought my first one at a yard sale not long after moving down to Tennessee.

These ones are on a small shelf in the bedroom, but the rest (25 or so) are all in the living room.

I doubt if I have spent $150 on all of them.

They are rugged and rustic and utilitarian, and are in all the shades of brown and beige and creme and black that I seem to gravitate towards when it comes to decorating the house................

My Alaska bear rock.............

I don't know what to believe in.

I haven't known what to believe in for a long time now.

But I like the sign anyway...................

This dusty wood mask is hanging on the wall in LC's office.

It is heavy and crudely carved out of one piece of wood, and it spoke to me for some compelling reason that I don't take the time to question.................

I bought this huge swan at a yard sale in Tennessee many years ago.

It made its way safely all the way to Alaska, and then safely made its way to Wyoming, back to Tennessee, back to Wyoming and then over to Idaho.

It was sitting on the kitchen table and a few months after Kory found her way into our lives she learned that she could jump up onto the table to see out of the kitchen window.

When I came back into the house my wood table was scratched, one of the chairs was scratched, and the swan was laying in two pieces on the floor.

Swan had safely traveled all away across the country three times, but was no match for our new puppy.

LC glued his broken neck, and he now sits in a place safe from the youthful energy of a dog named Kory..............

A total dumpster dive find..............

A friend that I was working with in Tennessee found this in a park one day during the summer.

When she pulled into the parking lot of our main work building she pulled it out of the truck and showed it to me, and I admired it greatly.

It was a cast iron door stop in the shape of a cat, and was a weird and eclectic combination of paint and rust.

It was so ugly it was beautiful.

 The woman came to a Christmas party at our house many months later.

It was my last Christmas in Tennessee.  I was scheduled to start a new job on January 9th only a couple of  weeks later.

I was scared.  I was excited.  I was hopeful.  I already missed everyone and everything that I was leaving behind and I had not even left yet.

There were a lot of people at the house for that party, and everyone had brought low cost gifts that were placed under the tree.  The kind of generic gag-gifts that you buy for co-workers who would draw numbers and pick a package.

The lady told everyone that her gift was specifically for me.

When my number finally came up I reached under the tree and picked up a large, flat, heavy box.

Intrigued, I quickly unwrapped the gift.

It was the cat.

I had liked the cat.  The woman remembered that I liked that cat.  And she gave it to me many months later as I was getting ready to leave everything and everyone that I knew.

I'll never forget her kind gesture..

It sits by the fireplace in the living room now.

And it is still so ugly that it's beautiful.........................

There was about a year after we first moved down to Tennessee when money was very tight.

My husband at the time was not making a lot of money, and my immigration status was still not finalized yet so I could not work.

There was occasionally money enough to pick up some odds and ends at yard sales, but even those kinds of trips were few and far between.

We lived in an upper middle-class area about 30 minutes north of Nashville, and (as it turns out) upper middle-class people throw away some very nice things.

Like the wooden sled in the picture further up in this blog post.

And like these wooden boxes.

I picked these up on the side of the road during three separate dumpster diving excursions and have had them for a very long time now.................

Left on the wall in the mudroom by the previous owners of this house................

LC and I bought two newer tractor sprinklers at two different yard sales last summer, and they cover the entire back yard.

This one is the real deal though - heavy, old, slightly rusted, most of its original paint, beautiful.

It sits in a corner of the living room..................

I bought these two rabbits at a yard sale in Tennessee years ago, and they always made me smile because they were both as cute as hell and because they reminded me of the boys.

Cute, goofy, always happily wandering through life, all the while keeping one eye on each other in that semi-competitive way that two boys close in age have with each other...................

Do we own things, or do they own us??...........My friend M&M (previously from Tennessee - now in Arizona)

Early American Yard Sale - Part 1

Life has been incredibly quiet recently, as LC and I have been mired in the banal and tedious.

With late February and early March temperatures in the mid to upper 50's we have continued to tear down a greenhouse that was both badly constructed and badly weathered.

Endless trips throughout the yard as we find new homes for seemingly endless wheelbarrows-full of dirt.   Filling in low spots in a yard that was not graded properly during the time when it should have been graded properly, and continuing to smooth out dirt from an 8 foot irrigation trench that was unceremoniously (but necessarily) cut through the middle of the back yard a month or so ago.

Yuk.  
Searching for good used dryers and VCR/DVD players when both died within days of each other.

Exploring trying to trade our 16 foot camper for something smaller and lighter, and then quickly tiring of the effort after too many liars, beat up campers, and hidden catastrophic camper-accidents were uncovered..

We'll keep what we have and thanks anyway.

And finally beginning to paint the exterior of the house, which has likely not been painted since the time it was built in the 70's.
One day soon a faded yellow house will be a neutral brown house.............

Some random pictures of some random things inside our house..............

The mask is sitting on the wall in LC's office slash computer room, and when I look at the picture above it makes me smile.

I found it sitting on the ground in the bushes of an elderly lady who lives here in Atomic City.

It was deeply weathered and not in a good way, and I knew when I looked at it that it was one long forgotten relic that would simply continue to lay exactly where it had laid for years until the time when it simply turned to dust.

I had already gotten the little row boat from the woman after helping to move nasty boxes filled with moldy things from a damp storage trailer to her living room (Yuk), and as I walked back to my truck (that was parked in her driveway) I bent down and picked up this worn and weathered thing.

It was faded.   It had been colorfully painted at some point but very little of the paint remained and the surface was beginning to crumble away just a little.

Turning it over I looked at the back side of the mask, idly wondering if the thing could be saved.

I didn't know.

Walking back to the womans' front door I knocked loudly, and when she finally appeared I told her that I had found this in the yard.

Did she want it?  No she didn't.

Could I have it?  Yes I could.

Quickly thanking her I walked back to the truck with my new find, wondering if I had found a piece of junk that would eventually be tossed into the garbage can in the garage, or if I could save it.

Suddenly I felt like my son Chris, who (as a little boy) would regularly come home carrying some treasure or other that he had found in a junk pile or in a garbage can sitting alongside the road.  

(How many times did I tell a little boy to "Don't bring that thing in the house - take it outside!")?

After some light sanding, a couple of coats of stain and some clear coat, I realized with satisfaction that we had given new life to a beautiful wooden mask.................

The Great Northern Railway sign sits on the wall in our kitchen.

It is faded and chipped and on old wood boards.  I bought it at a very low price and love it............

An old metal squirrel (also in our kitchen) that was bought at a yard sale years ago in Tennessee.

I look around the house and it is decorated in decor that could only be described as "Early American Yard Sale".

I also look around the house and realize that it is a history of our lives over the past few years, with things purchased in Tennessee, Alaska, Wyoming and Idaho..............

A picture of moose partially hidden in the trees.

Without consciously thinking about it, themes have naturally developed in terms of how we are decorating the house.

Lots of browns, blacks and greens.

A whole lot of "cowboy" and a whole lot of wild animals (bear, moose, elk, squirrel, owls and eagles and antlers).

The picture is big and beautiful, and hangs over the love seat in the living room..............

I bought this old fireplace cover probably fifteen years ago, and have stead-fastly dragged this stupid thing all over the country.

It is made of cast iron, probably weighs 30 pounds or more and now sits on the wall beside our wood stove in the living room...............

My favorite picture.

It's big and fancy and a gallery grade piece of art by a known artist, and whenever I look at it in the living room it pleases me because it is beautiful.

I bought it very cheaply from a young man in Cody not long before we moved to Idaho.

He was trying to sell most of his belongings so that he could finance a move back to Georgia where his family lived, and I never expected to own something like this.................

And then there's my $2 painting.

I was at a yard sale a very long time ago and picked up this painting on canvas to admire it.

I loved all the different shades of green.  The coming storm.  The elderly man and young girl silently walking down the middle of the dirt road.

The flash on my camera makes the picture appear brighter than it actually is, and even though the mood of the picture is dark, the painting still speaks to me in that way that art has a way of doing.

Still holding the painting I turned to the owner and asked how much it was.

She told me $20 and as I returned it to its resting place on the ground and leaning against an old chair, I regretfully told the lady that I couldn't afford that.

I couldn't afford it, and after putting it back I continued wandering around the yard sale, the painting already forgotten.

A few minutes later the lady asked me if I would like to buy it for $2.

One more thing that I have also carefully dragged all over the country.

Last year LC made a wood frame for it, and it now hangs in the hallway..................

Two black and white nature pictures - one bought at a yard sale and one bought at a Goodwill store................

There is a 20 acre piece of property on the outskirts of town that is owned by one of our neighbors.

The empty piece of raw land is filled with.............junk.   Lots of junk.  Endless piles of junk.

Wood, brick, glass, cinder block, tires, broken windows, you name it and it is likely there somewhere.

The elderly man (for well over 20 years apparently) has wanted to clear that piece of land, but has never gotten around it, and likely never WILL get around to it.

But in the meantime he told us that we were welcome to take anything that we wanted from the land that we thought we could use.

We used a couple of old doors in the house (after so many coats of paints that those doors are probably bullet proof at this point).

We used a lot of wood - some for the inside of the house, some for the storage building we built in the back yard last fall, some of it cut up and burned in our wood stoves over this past winter.

One day last spring LC and I were digging through a pile of.........junk..........and I saw something flat and metal that was half buried in the dirt.

Bending down I fully expected it to be one more piece of random and rusted and useless metal.

Only it wasn't.

It was this Indian on horseback.

I don't know exactly what this thing was originally.  I wish that it wasn't broken.  

But I instantly fell in love with it.

Surprised and delighted at my unexpected find, I called LC over to look at it.

As he got closer he asked me what it was and I extended my hand to show him.

And just like a little kid I good naturedly smiled at my Mountain Boy and informed him "It's mine - I found it - you can't have it!"

He smiled back at me, and a week later it had been cleaned up a little, screwed to a piece of wood, and now hangs on the wall in LC's "cowboy bathroom"..................

Two more pictures in the cowboy bathroom.

The first one is done by the same artist as the huge cowboy picture in the living room, although when we bought it at a yard sale in Cody we did not know that at the time............

The Indian painting on horseback and chasing a buffalo was done on canvas and then glued to sheet rock.

LC made a rustic frame for it..................

It goes with nothing but I like this painting very much.

I found it at a yard sale in Tennessee and it was painted by the son of the woman holding the yard sale.

Why would someone sell her sons' old painting?  Who knows?

But I paid a quarter for it....................

A picture that I took while spending a week in Sitka Alaska.

I remember the very moment I took this picture.
The day was cold and drizzling, misty and grey (just as most of the other days were during my stay).

I was standing in the middle of a bridge that separated two islands, and these two homes where located on a small point out in the water close to the bridge.

LC was in Alabama, I missed the boys, I hated my job, the world was closing in around me and I felt as lonely and sad as anyone was capable of feeling..

It was the week of Thanksgiving 2010, and I spent a week away from Juneau wandering aimlessly, exploring endlessly, moving tirelessly.

But I liked Sitka very much......................

One day about six months ago I saw a posting on a local online classifieds site.

It was for a very large picture of two cowboys riding their horses downhill in the rain.

The second hand store that had the picture posted wanted $100 for it, and although I liked the picture very much I could not justify the expense.

100 bucks for something we did not need was not doable and so I put the picture out of my mind.

A couple of months later LC and I were in Idaho Falls.  We were going to the same second hand store to purchase a chop saw and by that time I had completely forgotten about the picture.

Walking into the store for the first time I was less than impressed.  

It was a dirty, dusty, disorganized store filled with piles of random things seemingly tossed everywhere.

While LC talked to the owner of the store and looked over the chop saw, I aimlessly wandered around the filled-to-the-rafters store intrigued by nothing that I saw.

LC bought the chop saw.  It was brand new, he got it for a very good price and happily walked out of the store for a few minutes to load his new tool into the back of the Tahoe.

As I headed for the door I looked down and (lying on the floor between a book shelf and a chair) I saw the picture below.

Bending down I pulled the picture out from its hiding place so that I could take a better look at it, and by the time LC walked back into the store I had pulled out the other two pictures as well, each picture larger than the previous one.

The first picture was uninspiring and the picture of the three horses was beautiful.

The third (and largest picture) was the same picture I had seen online a couple of months earlier.  
I had forgotten all about it.

Standing them all up against random pieces of sorry looking furniture, LC and I carefully regarded the three pictures.

We looked at the pictures and then looked at each other.  And then looked at the pictures again and looked at each other again.

$125 later we walked out with all three pictures.

I don't think that the first picture is anything special (although it was professionally framed and we both like the colors).

The second one I am still trying to find information on.

The third picture is a famous picture and really is something special.

They now all hang on walls in our master bedroom...............

LC and I were driving in the mountains outside of Cody WY during the summer of 2011 when we pulled into a gravel parking area that overlooked the valley below.

LC, Jamie and I wandered around the overlook, and I snapped many pictures of the valley that was surrounded in every direction by mountains.

After a few minutes LC and I sat on a large boulder talking and relaxing on a beautiful day, in a beautiful place, and then I looked down at the ground.

Something was half buried in the dirt almost right by my feet.

Curious, I bent down, dug around the object with my hand and finally moved enough dirt out of the way to be able to pull it up.

It was this little plastic figure.

He is only about five inches tall, and looks as though he would have made a great gag gift for a dentist, so what he was doing half buried in the dirt in a pull-off in the mountains, I have no idea.

He was curious and outrageously whimsical and he made me smile.

And so we kept him.....................

A shelf made from salvaged wood from our neighbors' junk piles, and that is filled with old tools that we have collected at yard sales over the years...................

One of two antlers that I have found while walking with Kory out in the desert over the past year................

I was walking with Chris and our dog Roxy not long after we had all moved from Canada down to Tennessee.

It was the day after a storm, and on this calm morning I wandered along the edges of a lake with my youngest boy and the small dog that he had chosen as his own from the local animal shelter.

It must have been in fall because the ground under our feet was covered with wet leaves.

Chris must have stepped on it initially because all of a sudden he bent down and felt for something buried in the leaves.

When he stood up he had this old wooden rudder in his hands.

We looked at it enthusiastically, both of us excited at such a cool and unexpected find.

I love the shape of it, the color of it, the texture of it.

And I have always loved that my young son was the one to find it, and that he gave it to me as a gift.

One more thing that has followed me all over the country................

When LC, Jamie and I went to Bonners Ferry to see Chris in the fall of 2013 I wandered into a second hand store that was located right across the road from the motel where we were all staying.

There was not much of interest in there and just as I was getting ready to walk out of the store I instead impulsively wandered into a section of brightly color toys.

On a shelf I found a sandwich bag filled with what looked like wooden puzzle pieces but I couldn't tell what the puzzle was all about.

Opening the bag I laid the pieces out on a shelf trying to figure out what the pieces actually made.

It was an eagle.

Paying 25c for the puzzle pieces I brought them home with me, put them together, glued them to a piece of scrap wood that we had stained, and now the whole thing hangs on the wall in the living room by the front door................

Old wooden spools in the kitchen window...................

While waiting for LC and Jamie to join me in Juneau in the summer of 2010, I one day went on a whale watching tour.

I had a great time, loved every minute of the morning, and took endless pictures of both whales and other sea life.

Such a great time.

After the trip was done I climbed into the death-trap of a car that I had bought very cheaply up there and headed towards home.

On the spur of the moment I pulled into the campus of the University of Alaska and followed the yard sale signs until I reached the dorms.

I bought the Red Moose Inn sign at that yard sale.

It hung on the wall outside the home that we were renting in Juneau.  

And then it hung on the wall outside the home that we were renting in Cody.

When it was finally put up on the wall outside our home in Tennessee, I remember looking at it wistfully and dearly hoping that it would stay up there for a very long time.

It didn't................................