The Good, The Bad…and the Smelly

The fun started on Thursday last week, when I stopped at an estate sale on my way to the grocery store. The ad on Craigslist showed a lot of interesting items. However, there was no mention of the, um, well, very strong smell of cat pee in the house. Which didn’t seem to stop anyone (including me!) though I admit I hurried through more than I would otherwise have done. 

A quick perusal turned up only a couple of items that I thought looked fun, one being a very nicely framed print of a watercolor by Valerie Pfeiffer, called “Budgies Galore.” I thought Millie might especially enjoy it.

Her kitty box lives in the bathtub in an alcove of our master bathroom. We never take tub baths, just showers. So it’s the perfect spot for the box, containing all the inevitable litter that gets tracked outside the box. Now Millie has art in ‘her’ bathroom.

I also grabbed a couple of baggies with kitchen linens, which turned out to include some interesting vintage tea towels.

My favorite of the lot is this small towel hand appliqued with a farmer picking apples. I think.

Friday morning’s adventure began with another estate sale which mentioned art supplies in the ad. But again, the ad left out that the house had evidently been occupied by a chain smoker for the past umpty years. And while the kitty smell from Thursday’s sale was unpleasant, I’m actually quite sensitive to smoke, which gives me joint and muscle pains like having the flu. Normally I would have taken one quick peek and left, but this house was full of whimsical items that I could not resist looking at.

KK got a great deal on a bunch of oil paints and brushes. I was stopped in my tracks in the first room by…bunnies! I didn’t have my camera with me, darn it. This could well have been the best bunny collection I've encountered. But I was very, very restrained, being mindful of how many bunnies have already come home with me. But this little glass bunny won't take up much room, right? And he didn't cost much more than the dime I used for scale.

And what could possibly be more practical than a set of bunny tablecloth weights?

Which are at this very moment keeping the tablecloth out on my deck from flying away in the breeze.

I admit the first thing I did when I got home was give them a good scrub. You can see from this before-and-after shot that they needed it!

My favorite find was this fabulous bronze candle holder. Even though it was marked $10 (a huge amount for me!) I grabbed it.

Seriously, you couldn’t have left without these faces either, right? And the nice lady running the sale seemed happy to take a fiver for them when I assured her they’d have a good home.

They appear to be from the same maker as the bunny paddling a canoe I showed you a couple of posts ago. As always I did some online digging to try to establish value and where they might have come from. Didn’t find out much, but I was amazed to see a very similar pair on Pinterest, which led me to Etsy, where I saw that they had sold. And the asking price had been $110!

Plus, amid the bunnies I spotted something else that’s hard to resist, an acorn item. (What is it about acorns?)

A hand-painted trinket box, about two inches high. Which is now on my acorn shelf, holding – that’s right – a real acorn.

Bunnies turned out to be The Item of the Day. We saw them at every other sale throughout the morning. But none were tempting, and in fact neither of us bought anything else even though we stopped at about a dozen sales. I've noticed this phenomenon before; seems like if you get a really good score at the first stop you might as well go home because that’s all you get that day. But of course you never know, and garaging is a form of gambling after all!

So we were done with buying, but it turned out not with smells. Yet another estate sale, and the house was fine…but evidently the smoker in the family had gone out to the garage to partake. For years. And being a much smaller space the residue was even more intense. I really did have to leave that one quite quickly.

But it was the usual garage collection of tools and miscellany. No bunnies, no problem!