Good Thrifting Luck

For about one week, maybe a week and a half Nate and I had about the best thrifting/alley scrounging/garage sailing luck I've had since about 1997 when my mom and I found a Saarinen Tulip Armchair at a church rummage sale for $5. Supposedly that chair had been on the set of AM Northwest the local ABC station's morning talk show which I'm sure made it all the more valuable.



So our good luck started one morning when Nate called me at work to tell me that he had found an actual nice looking piece of furniture in the alley. There are frequently pieces of furniture in our alley but rarely are they any good. Usually they are old peed on couches or falling apart book cases. I am a great coinsurer of alley furniture but since we moved to Hermosa our alley hasn't produced anything worth scrounging except for a few plant pots and a cool stain glass window that is sitting in our garden because I still don't know what to do with it. Anyway I immediately told Nate to get it and put it in the yard, who cares if we don't have any room for it. If we can't find a place for it or I decide it's ugly we can just return it to the alley from whence it came.



We managed to move a few things around and find a good place for our new alley buffet. I made a runner for it from a couple of tenugui dish towels and I now have room for my formerly overcrowded dishes and for future thrifting finds.



Speaking of things to fill the new buffet with, at a thrift store in Solvang I found these saucers with the same pattern as a creamer I bought myself a couple of months ago at the local antique mall. I have no clue what the pattern is called or who the maker is but I love the Scandinavian looking stylized leaf pattern. These were only 50 cents a piece. I also found one of the elusive ceramic deer that I was looking for right before Christmas. I knew that cute ceramic deer would be all over the place once I wasn't looking for them anymore but I couldn't resist this one for only 25 cents.



Last but certainly not least Nate and I were walking back from the beach over the weekend (I guess this was actually the weekend before last) and I looked across the street and exclaimed "There's an Eames chair on the sidewalk!" It turns out it wasn't an actual Eames chair but a fake one made in the 70s by a company called Plycraft. Even these fake ones sell for a lot of money on eBay and we definitely got this one for a steal since the owners were moving to Ibiza, Spain and had to get rid of all their stuff quick. I won't tell you how much but it really wasn't much. Less than what I'm hoping to get for my old too big and not too comfortable Ikea chair that it is replacing.

The good luck definitely came to an end the day after with a couple of failed estate sale attempts (wrong address listed in the pennysaver) and another one last weekend that had the perfect coffee table but it was already sold. I think that like love great thrifting/alley scrounging/garage sailing finds really come when you are aren't really looking for them.