Great Weather, Poor Saling

It was a beautiful fall morning here: crisp and clear. A lovely morning for a little drive, but unfortunately, no goodies to be found.

So I'll just have to wax rhapsodic about past garage sale finds instead.

This little reading corner is at the top of our back stair case. It's a very strange little triangle-shaped space which once housed my desk & computer. Now that our kids have (mostly) grown up and moved away, we have actual bedrooms available for things like desks & computers! Hence the "reading corner". Except for the book shelves, which were here when I moved in, everything else came from garage sales. The big cozy chair was $10. It has a little tear on one of its arms, but we're sort of rough on stuff around here anyway, so it doesn't really bother me. I bought the floor lamp at a sale so long ago that I can't remember how much I paid for it, but I'm sure it wasn't more than $20. The funny thing is that I have two of them in the house, exactly alike, from separate garage sales. The little side table cost $15. That is something I was actively hunting for: it needed to be just the right height to work with the big cushy chair. The carved wooden window piece was $5. It's broken on one side, but still pretty cool. I bought it with absolutely no idea how I'd use it. I wandered around the house with it and discovered that it fit perfectly over this little window. The wooden tapestry hanger was a gift from my friend Carol, who travelled all over Asia last spring. The green scarf hanging on it came from a garage sale in Arkansas. And last, but not least, you can see two little Royal Doulton mice. They're called "The Flax Weavers." I rescued them from a particularly icky garage sale in San Diego a lot of years ago. They were sitting like little lost souls among grimy piles of old tools and junk, and the young man who sold them to me clearly had no attachment to them. I think he sold them to me for $1. (Out of curiosity, I just looked them up online: it turns out they're from "The Bramblyhedge Collection." The Flax Weaver, the adorable little guy in blue pants, is priced anywhere from $175 to $300. Lily Weaver, in the charming dress & cap, is going for about $195.)

The book shelves in this reading corner, of course, are packed full of lots more garage sale finds: books! But that will have to be a whole different topic for another day.