#ThriftScoreThursday

My blog friend Brandi starting using the hashtag #ThriftScoreThursday on her Instagram and I was very intrigued. I tracked down the source of such fun and found that four lovely ladies, Black & White Obsession, For My Love Of,  Primitive and Proper,  and The Gathered Home host a link up for everyone to post their super finds from thrift stores, junk shops, antique stores, and flea markets. I have been really having a ball seeing everyone’s great deals!

I’ve been traveling a ton and have had the chance to score some great deals as we curate our home.

I got this Thirty-One magazine basket (used for TP storage in our bathroom) and a ton of white Corelle plates  (I’ve been hunting for some for months) at different Goodwills. I like the plain white Corelle plates because they are almost impossible to break and I now have enough that I can host a shower with real table wear now.

  

Justin and I love estate sales. I signed up with estatesales.net to get alerts for all of the estate sales in our area. I get an email on Thursdays of the ones that are that weekend. We traveled to Leslie, Georgia to a veterinarian’s downtown building. We walked in and were quickly disappointed. I was expecting cool vet tools and gadgets, etc. We found out the building went on around the corner and upstairs and had lots of fun digging around. We scored 14 old window frames and a whole trailer load of reclaimed barn wood and tongue-and-groove bead board (more on that in a later post). We quickly posted the windows to Facebook and sold them to our friends and made our money back from our entire purchase! So basically we got the load of wood for free with the exception of our time and gas money!

 

This one isn’t a thrift score, but I occasionally come across some gems at Dollar Tree and I have to say this is one of them. I bought an Air Curler, something I had seen on one of those TV informercials. I think most of that stuff doesn’t work as well as they advertise, but for $1 I’d give it a try. I can’t work a curling iron to save my life and I am always pining for soft curls and waves. Lo and behold, the sucker worked! I am pleasantly surprised with this tool!

I grabbed up some peach box labels at the Antique Theater in Perry. I didn’t get a picture of all of them here, but they will be great for my gallery wall. These are only $1!

 

I am not a clever person. Occasionally I can come up with some unique repurposing thing for the house, but most of my ideas come from Pinterest or blogs. I am lucky I stumbled upon this smart vendor at Pickin’ Peanuts Marketplace in Ashburn for only $8! They stuck a taper candle in an old wheel and it has a very happy home on my factory cart table.

Justin wins the score of the year so far! We have been oogly-googly over these countertop scales. Saturday morning he called and told me he made an executive decision and pulled the trigger and bought one. I was a little flustered because we haven’t seen them for less than $200. He scored this Hobart scale and Hobart meat slicer (one of our we’d-love-it-but-will-never-afford-it things) for $100 total! I am so proud of his keen eye for quality when he sees it. For kicks, we looked up both on eBay and they each start out around $250 each!

  

All of this being said, people constantly ask us where we find our stuff and how we get such great deals. It’s not always easy. We strike out often. We have a running wish list and an idea of what we would like to pay for things. For example, I want an old square tobacco basket but they retail for $100 or more. I just KNOW if I’m patient enough I’ll find one at an estate sale or yard sale from someone who wants to get rid of it for a song. Patience, grasshopper.

I mentioned on Instagram that hunting for these sweet deals is like that princess that has to kiss a lot of frogs to find her prince. In my case, it’s sifting through giant warehouses of junk or looking over fancy signs like this at tens of Goodwills:

Random Bits and Pieces

Thanks to seeing friends in Walmart one night and striking up a random conversation about convenience store fixtures, I am now the proud owner of a potato chip clip rack. I had a brainstorm one day that this would be perfect Koozie storage for Justin’s ever growing collection. Raymond and Amy have Rescue’s Smokehouse and were renovating an old convenience store for their restaurant relocation. They gave us several racks and this is a really convenient way to see all of them at a glance. One’s drinks should never lose their chill or get your hands wet!

We went to a friend’s birthday party at the local skating rink. After some initial hesitation, we scored Wyatt one of these cool training walkers. This was a big mistake on my part. The boy was off like a shot of lightning and I seriously couldn’t keep up with him on my own skates. Every time he fell, I would skate furiously to catch up to him to help him up. By the time I could reach him, he was back on skates speeding off.

 

My sister-in-law and brother-in-law’s goat had twin kids and they are just adorable! There is a boy and a girl. Wyatt loves seeing the babies!

  

I was leaving for a work meeting one day and realized my tire indicator was on. I was sick of slow leaks so Justin told me to go to the local tire shop and have them look at it. I am so lucky I did! The alignment on my car was off and I had worn the inside of the front passenger tire until you could see wire. I would have almost certainly had a blow out any day and my luck would have been that it was on the interstate. I promptly got a new tire, got my car alignment recalibrated, and got on the way to my meeting after almost two hours. I am thankful for the little things that almost-were-but-didn’t-happen! It is a blessing!

 

While I was in Athens for a workshop, I made a late night run to Target. I love their thank you notes in the dollar spot and I had a brilliant idea. I love to write thank you notes in my car when I am early for meetings. I grabbed up a coupon binder and was able to put several different card designs, stamps, and return address labels in it. It’s a great way to keep them from getting bent up and it’s handy enough to throw in my purse when I know I will have some downtime. I can never write too many thank you notes—they really go a long way!

  

Justin is so sweet to me! He forced me to get my master’s diploma framed to match my undergraduate degree. It looks so good and I will be really proud to hang it in my office.

 

I have an addiction to bags. I think I might have gone overboard with the chevron, but I love this red and black overnight bag my sister Suzi got me for Christmas! It is perfect for a quick trip to Atlanta and back.

I love group texts with my mama and my sisters! Suzi sent us a picture of all of her Thirty-One bags piled up on her car seat. I just so happened to have just stopped at Jersey Mikes to pick up our meal for the Ashburn Women’s Club so I had to come back with a sassy reply!

 

Insulator Lighting

My SIL Amanda and I have amassed a treasure trove of glass insulators that we’ve had stashed away for projects. Justin has used some before for lighting projects using a diamond tipped drill bit and wiring them up for lamps and pendants, but I wanted to use more of them around the house with no real commitment to major work or costs. 

I saw somewhere on Pinterest to place LED battery-operated tea lights under them and just set them around the house and that’s exactly what I did!

These turquoise insulators are really neat with color-changing LED tea lights below them. There seems to be no rhyme or reason to the color patterns. When the tea lights are off, they just look like plain blue insulators and you can barely even see the tea lights in them.

  

I also used some plain steady white LED battery operated tea lights for my clear insulators. They look much more realistic on our mantel.

I snapped this pic of the insulators all lit up with my sugar mold candles and tea lights set out on our new table. I think we’re pretty set if the power goes out!

Window Craftiness

Justin and I found salvaged windows at the Big Peach Antique Mall in Byron, Georgia for only $10 each! They were in good shape so we loaded them up.

The first one is huge! I printed nine full size 8 1/2” x 11” sheets with our family photos and you can still see around them just a bit! I just taped them to the back side of the glass with Scotch tape after I cleaned them well with Windex and let them dry. These should be easy to switch out this way. We have a gorgeous way to display our family photos from this fall and the whole project cost me about $15 including tape and printing.

 

The second window was smaller but we decided we wanted to replace the glass panes with mirrors for the dresser in the hallway where I get ready in the morning. Justin popped the old glass out and I took it to Batts Glass in Tifton and got them to cut me six panes. All together they were $18. Justin reglazed the mirror panes and we got it up and already in use. The only thing I recommend: make sure you take each pane to be measured individually. Justin had to trim and sand some of the sides for the mirrors to fit. Again, only $30 for this project and we got an interesting piece that is functional and so very “us.”

Factory Cart Coffee Table

Back in August I posted about Justin and I buying a very neglected factory cart. I was so excited to get it but we got wrapped up in working in the garden, then a ton of work activities and eventually I forgot it was even stored in the shed or garage somewhere.

Justin has been secretly working at his daddy’s on “my Christmas present” for a week now and the factory cart didn’t even cross my mind. I was expecting a bench from a salvaged headboard I bought a month ago or some picture frames for my still un-hung gallery wall. Imagine my surprise when I walked into our living room and found this beauty!

Justin lovingly restored this beat up cart and turned it into the centerpiece of the heart of our home: our living room. I am beyond excited and am so grateful I have such an amazing husband. I tell folks that he gives me more blog material with his awesome projects and that I’m just the documentarian.

This time, though, since it was a surprise I wasn’t around to snap pictures of the process. Lucky for me, Justin did that for me too! It is so neat to see the process and the improvement after all of his hard work.

Hardware pulled off the old cart and sand blasted.

All of the pieces hung to be primed.

  

 

This wood is very special. The two end pieces are the original oak boards that came from the cart. The top pieces are planed boards from an old barn we were able to tear down last summer. Justin stained all of the wood to match and coated it with a semi-gloss polyurethane.

 

He had to dry fit the hardware to be sure the holes were all in the right places. This is why you see only the primed hardware and the unstained boards below.

  

I love that he kept some of the old wood pieces in tact. The bottom brace is original.

 

Finally, one small touch that he didn’t photograph that I really think is amazing is that he used his branding iron to brand his initials into the underside. Hopefully this will be a family piece that we can pass down to our kids but if for some reason it gets sold, it’s really neat to know that Justin has left his mark on his handiwork.

  

 

Wrapping up November

Thanksgiving was a lot of running around and TONS of eating as usual this year. Wyatt liked helping cook I think.

I made this yummy pecan pie with local folks’ pecans and Justin walked out Thanksgiving morning and picked greens right out of the garden to cook up for that afternoon. I think we’re going to do an entire made-by-us Thanksgiving as soon as we can get our chicken and turkey pen set up. I think it would be really cool to have grown or raised our entire meal. Except cranberry sauce; I’ve never seen cranberries in Georgia but I won’t budge on that one!

Justin pulled the gas insert out of our fireplace and we discovered the hearth is HUGE! The chimney sweep came out and inspected it and gave us the go ahead to use it to burn wood in and we had our first fire of the season. It’s so cozy!

Sami and I took Wyatt to the Macon Centreplex to ice skate. That was a disaster. I don’t think the rental skates are very nice so it was hard to lace them up tightly so after one lap around our feet were killing us! Wyatt said he didn’t like it and so we just gave up. It certainly wasn’t as easier as it was in high school and trying to keep Wyatt from falling was tough!

On our way back from Macon, we checked out a few antique stores. I got this perfect Georgia souvenir plate for my gallery wall. The gallery wall that isn’t even up yet. Amanda, Sami, and I are going to work on that soon.

I repurposed our old broken mailbox we stored in the garage (just in case we might need it…) into a Santa mailbox. I just gave it a fresh coat of oil rubbed bronze paint and wrote on it with a chalk marker. I have intentions of sitting down with Wyatt and writing out his letter to Santa soon.

Wyatt has not one but TWO rugs with roads on them made specifically for this purpose but he prefers the giant piece of cardboard I drew on to push his tractors and cars around on.

This one is a game-changer. I am sick and tired of chasing down random canning rings that we reuse from our canned foods. I might have seen it on Pinterest or it might have come to me out of the blue (I honestly can’t remember seeing it on Pinterest but others have). Repurposing an old paper towel roll holder is a great idea!