Rusty Rings

When we were digging through some junk in the back room of one of our favorite local shops, we uncovered a little box of rusty canning lid rings. We're pretty sure a lot of people would have put them aside and kept digging for the real treasure, but we're not a lot of people. We love little boxes of rusty stuff!


The little box was carried up to the counter, along with a few canning jars with zinc lids, and a few other little odds and ends, and the tallying began. Imagine our delight when the woman dismissed the box with a wave of her hand and declared that it was a freebie! We almost swooned. A little box of rusty goodness... free for the taking. It was destiny.

The little box of rusty goodness has been waiting patiently for us to have time to make some awesome repurposed rusty goodness out of it. We have a couple of ideas...

Perhaps this cute thing as seen on one of my favorite blogs, Funky Junk Interiors?

Or this might be a sufficient amount of awesomeness from A Simply Klassic Home... you may recognize it as the winner of Country Living's Pinterest Pumpkin contest. :)

So much rusty goodness, so little time... :)

A cleaning proverb, a sweet chair and a table with potential.

I'm kind of amazed at myself today. I spent a solid 8 hours cleaning and organizing the garage and carport, and my poor old 45 year old body is now letting me know that it may have been a bad idea. I disagree. I might be a little really sore tomorrow, but by god, I have SPACE in my garage again!

I know everyone has messy garages, but ours had gotten pretty ridiculous. It's not just the boxes and boxes of things that I brought home from my mother's house over the last year. (sisters' sorting parties are in the works!) Those are definitely taking up a lot of space, but the other issue that is more frustrating is the lack of interest that my family seems to have in putting things where they belong. I clean off a shelf, or organize a drawer, or provide a basket - but stuff still gets left between where it was used and where it should be.

I know you are nodding your heads. :)

So I heartlessly threw stuff in the trash all day, I put stuff in the attic, I put like things together and organized them, I listed a ton of stuff on Craigslist.com... and at the end of the day I have some space in the garage again. Awesome. I feel lighter.

And as a bonus, I pulled out this sweet chair that I brought home from my mom's a couple of weeks ago and cleaned her up. It was in the workshop that mom and I had been using as our "this has potential!!" storage area, and I just couldn't leave it behind.

It's missing a couple of cross-braces between the legs, and obviously a seat. It was filthy to start with, but as you can see it cleaned up pretty well. The plan is to staple some nylon window screen into the seat so that it can be planted with some annuals and put on someone's porch. Adorable!

 

 

How cool is it that you can see where the rungs in the front are worn from someone's little feet resting there? I love stuff like that. 

I also pulled this table out and gave it a second look. It is too colonial for my taste, but it was a freebie on the curb I picked up a while back. The top was hinged so that you could store stuff in it, but where it hinged didn't allow for it to open enough  for it to be really useful. It would be hard to find stuff back in there, you know? I thought about just putting it on MY curb... then I thought again. I grabbed my rubber mallet and started giving it some whacks, and eventually it was topless.

Definitely better... of course that's when I saw that the top wasn't just glued in, but actually had screws in it. I was too impatient to discover this pre-whacking...No damage done, however. I'm thinking it would be a great display table with a small window or even just a piece of glass placed over the top. Ideas? What do you think??

Weird Sale - Great Goodies!

The other day I ran across a yard sale where a guy was selling quite a bit of old furniture and yard items. I got a metal glider and a couple of metal chairs for my mom to go on her patio. When I went back to pick them up with Hubby, the guy invited us to go through his house to see if there was anything else we might be interested in. Oh my god, was that interesting.

This guy is a hoarder. He had boxes and boxes and piles and piles of stuff in every room of his house. I mean EVERY ROOM. There were 78 rpm records from the 40's (Tex Ritter!), collections of brass instruments, assorted "see no evil" monkey figurines... And a whole lot of junk to go with the cool stuff. We quickly decided we couldn't do the monumental task of actually looking at everything justice (plus, Hubby doesn't like digging through people's stuff, even when asked to do so), so we left. But I vowed to return!

The next day my mom and I went back prepared to scrounge. After two-and-a-half hours of going through every box that looked interesting (and that we were capable of getting to), and surveying all the furniture in the house, we came away with a few things. I ended up with a little box of sewing notions, some costume jewelry, a few vintage ties, a nice Haeger pottery bowl, a ton of vintage buttons, an old crocheted doily, a milk glass jar, and some old cabinet door handles. I also have two large cabinet doors and two small ones in the garage waiting to be repurposed. I tell you I don't know how that guy has managed it, but he doesn't have any place to sit in that house. Really - now that I'm thinking about it... there are no empty chairs. Weird.

There was quite a bit more stuff I would have taken, but just don't need right now. But, I know where he lives...