Thrift store furniture

I LOVE a good thrift store find. It's always fun to find something that is already in good shape and "ready to use," but lets face it, that rarely happens now does it?

Most thrifty furniture lands at your local Goodwill, Salvation Army etc for a reason, because its old and crusty and someone doesn't want it any more right?

Imagination! That's the name of the game with these places! You have to see the potential in a piece and then convince your husband of that potential when he hassles you about why you've brought home yet another busted, crusty old desk, chair, bowl, shelf, you can fill in the blank here:________________.
(I have a dresser in my craft room with a drawer devoted to thrifty finds that have not yet met their potential and therefore must stay in the drawer until husband can see them,so that I don't get lip from him! ha ha. I does not matter if they cost 25 cents, he will get mad that they are junk!)

So, Imagination and Spray Paint! Those are the KEY ingredients here!

I wish I had some more pics to show you, but here are just a few. The rest are still out there reaching their potential. This first one is an AMAZING desk that my sister, Hannah did with a piece of junk desk she found for a few bucks on craigslist:

Gorgeous right? She spray painted the body of it with high gloss black paint and then the drawers with a turquoise color and replaced the knobs and wa-la! Then she stacked a bunch of crap on it so that I couldn't get a good picture. Meh.

And here is a little somehing I had posted about before, but its craptacular to fabulous!

Have a thrifty Tuesday!!



Flea market fun

Two weeks ago when I was back home in Virginia, I was lucky enough to have some time to go to a large flea market with my friend Katie, her mom Carol and of course...sweet baby Avery. Katie and I have been exploring flea markets, garage sales, and thrift stores since we were 11 or 12 so this was a fun time to catch up, look at junk, and let the baby have her first ever thrifty experience!!

Here are a few pictures of some things that I did NOT buy, but found interesting.

1. Fresh VA produce...it really doesn't get much better than this! I bought a dozen peaches that my sisters and I gobbled up, and Carol bought a head of cabbage that probably weighed close to 12 pounds!! So delicious!

2. This vendor had 25+ old lunch boxes for sale. I don't know who Rachel B. is...but she was one lucky girl to have such a bad ass popples lunch box! I LOVED my popples growing up! If this had been in better shape, I would have had a really hard time walking away from it.

 3. Grasshopper making himself cozy on someones table

4. Vintage Disney alphabet plates. Katie really liked these. They were $60 for the entire set. She really only wanted the ones to spell out "Avery" above her crib, but the lady wouldn't break up the set. She talked the lady into selling her the whole set for $30, but when we looked through them, there were only 20 letters....not 26, and the V and R were gone. Oh Well.

5. Wiener dog shoe scraper/door stop thinggy. I was very tempted to get this and put it by the back door. It would have been especially good for Chicago winters to scrape snow off of your boots before coming inside. They were asking $40 for it and would not budge, so I had to pass.

Have you been to a good old fashioned flea market lately? What were your favorite, or most interesting finds? Long weekend coming up...I bet there are some good markets out there! Have a good one!