It's Trash to Treasure Tuesday again ... how did the past week go by so quickly? I've been home almost all day, every day, getting started on my kitchen reno, and the time is flying by. I haven't been to a yard sale, thrift store, or antique mall in more than a month, so today I'm sharing some photos from my December junking trip to Vancouver, BC.
We flew in on a Saturday afternoon, and I brought a pre-made list of antique malls, quilting stores, flea markets, and even garage and estate sales (found through Craig's List). After settling in to our apartment on Saturday, I was ready to go junking bright and early on Sunday morning.
My best stop of the day was at an estate sale in this unassuming home. Sunday was the fourth-and-final day of the sale, and everything was half off from 12 noon until closing. I arrived around 11:30 and spent 2 very enjoyable hours going through 2 floors of very cluttered rooms -- plus a basement -- filled with a liftetime of treasures. Although many of the nicer items had been sorted and tagged, there were dozens of boxes to dig through in every room, plus the kitchen drawers and cabinets, the bedroom closets, several china cabinets, and all of the closets and dressers. Definitely my kind of sale :o)
I especially enjoyed getting to look through all the cabinets and drawers in the kitchen, and the dresser drawers in the bedrooms. I found two beautiful meat-carving sets that appear to have never been used: one is a four-piece set with Bakelite handles, and the other set has the requisite three pieces plus six steak knives and six forks, with wooden-looking Bakelite or plastic handles. Both were in their original boxes, and are headed for eBay.
The rest of my purchases were "smalls," as I had to fit everything into our suitcases and didn't want to pay for excess weight or luggage. I discovered a four drawer tallboy dresser in one of the bedrooms, completely filled with handmade doilies, sewing notions, buttons, table runners, and many other vintage items. I left the sale with two large boxes, having spent a total of $24 CAD (about $17.50 USD). This is a picture of the items from one of the boxes, spread out on the table back at our apartment. I ended up with lots of vintage greeting cards, hotel silver, storage tins, two manicure sets, several perfume bottles (one shaped like the Eiffel Tower), beautiful handkerchiefs, souvenir shotglasses, cocktail forks, a man's razor, silver-plated candleholders, embroidered pillowcases and tea towels, barkcloth slipcovers for a 3 seat sofa, assorted vintage buttons, several children's bow ties, a full set of very old checkers in their original box, and some other things that aren't pictured and which I can't recall.
Most of these treasures are now at my office, waiting to be cleaned, photographed, and listed on eBay. I'm planning to keep a few things for myself, including this little silver dish filled with brass buttons and shirt studs, some of the linens, and all three items shown in the photo below.
I love this blue-and-white storage tin, though I'm not certain what it once held. The sweet Eiffel Tower perfume bottle can be glimpsed on the righthand side of the photo. Like the pink atomizer, it needed a serious cleaning. I have a photo of the clean-and-sparkly atomizer below, but it doesn't show the actual color correctly ... it's a lovely pale pink, close to the color of the tassel in the photo on the right. I have a hunch that both of these perfume bottles are Avon, but both are charming and would look great on almost any dressing table.
Pretty In Pink
My 50 cent atomizer
Do you collect any of these items? What would you keep if these were your's?
Thanks for stopping by, and have a terrific Trash to Treasure week!
To see more terrific treasures, please visit Diane at A Picture is Worth a 1000 Words.
