Estate Sale Finds March 16, 2014

I love the arrival of spring - mostly because that means that the garage and estate sales will be starting up again.  I don't know about you, but I love digging thru other people's old stuff.  I can't help it, but if I'm driving down the street and I see an Estate Sale sign, my head whips around so quickly that I need to go visit the chiropractor.  Is there a garage sale with piles of junk  treasures spilling out onto the driveway?  Yep, you'll find me there, happily digging through boxes and dragging who knows what to the back of my car.  Sigh.....  I'm a junker and I'm afraid that I've passed the disease onto my daughter as well.

This weekend there were several estate sales in our area, so armed with small bills and my GPS, we took off, giddy with anticipation.

Here's what we found this weekend.  A wooden magazine holder that we've already filled with old license plates and a really great old crate.  I love crates that have the original wording on them...

.....and a great graphic on the side gets my heart thumping.   This crate was sitting in a back corner in a basement and was filled with a bunch of junk.   The crate wasn't even marked for sale, so I emptied it and offered to take it off their hands.  Can you hear my heart wildly beating?

I haven't seen a wooden cheese crate in awhile and the lid on this one moves easily.  The wooden shoe stretcher was a fun find and reminded me of the old shoe makers shop that I used to visit when I was a kid.  I picked up the metal power tool box because I loved the graphic on it and it's already filled with some of my own hand tools.  And I have a hard time resisting any type of Pyrex.  This bowl was an Americana edition and is headed to the lake house.

We found this oar standing in the corner of a garage.   It's colored with magic marker and is ugly as hell, but with a few coats of paint, this is going to look great!   I'm picturing it hanging over the kitchen cabinets at the lake house.

The small square is the top of a wooden crayon box.  I wish the box itself was there as well, but truth be told, this box cover was inside the aforementioned wooden cheese crate.   Probably my favorite find of the weekend was these 3 frames.  Chablis had originally picked them up because the frames are gorgeous - dark, well seasoned and sturdy wood.  I snatched them out of her hand and was excited to see that the frames held original Riverboat pilot's licenses, dated from 1948, 1952 and 1961.  A very cool find!

I always like finding old license plates to use in various projects.  Here we picked up 2 from the Illinois bi-centennial year and a couple of out of state plates.

 I fell in love with this old syrup jar.  I'm going to use it for sugar.  It cleaned up spotless too.

And finally a small cast iron egg pan.  This was in terrible condition, crusted with grease and rusted beyond belief.  Fortunately, I know how to clean them up and this beauty is now sitting in my kitchen, waiting to fry up some over-easy eggs!

So that's our finds for this weekend.  It's the thrill of the hunt -  I never know what I'm looking for, but I'll know it when I see it.  I'm always saying "Oh, I can sell this" and then I get it home and end up keeping it for myself.  Is that a sickness?  Does anyone else do that?