Harrisville's Community Wide Garage Sale

If there's one thing you know, know this: I love garage sales, flea markets, swap meets, and of course-thrift stores. I'm a poor teenager who can't afford new things, and isn't reusing on of the three "R"'s of Greenliness? You can walk into a thrift store with $20 and come out wit $5 and about 4 more outfits. Anyone who says that it doesn't make sense to be in love with thrift stores must have way too much money on their hands.

Besides being a Used Things Junky, I am very good at it. After all, aren't junkies just good at what they're addicted to. I've never heard of a bad crack addict. I will find the most hidden treasures, and I don't even know how. Just about 2 weeks ago, I was in St. Vinnies [our county's thrift store] and just happened to see a box under a table. They ended up having the most adorable banana slippers in them! I am a self proclaimed Used Things Junky/Hunter.

Today was the Harrisville's Community Wide Garage Sale. I had reported on it a while back and was actually timing my summer off of it. Just the other day I thought "Summer hasn't really started until I go to that garage sale." I was waiting every weekend for the day to roll by.

I got a bit of a late start since I had an interview at 10 and had to wait for my boyfriend Don to roll out of bed, but we hit the garage sale lined pavement at around 11 am. Harrisville had such a wonderful, friendly atmosphere going on. First of all, I'm not a big fan of Alcona, but I think that Harrisville is one of the cutest, most beautiful and proud areas I have ever been too. It's the small town with the single traffic light, a small gas station and grocery store and well kept lawns and beautiful old houses. It's an adorably small harbor town that sits on Lake Huron. And I love it. All the people are very communal, so you can expect that the streets were full of people doing the same thing we were. I loved the feeling of that, and it's a feeling you can't find anywhere else.

We shopped, we drove around, we saw some friends, got some food, and cruised and played Don's stereo system real loud, and this is our end result:

[I don't know how this works, but I'm sure you can click on the picture to enlarge it]

1.) Antique beer bottles: Don found some antique beer bottles from Holland. He collects beer, so besides appliances for our apartment, that's all he looked out for. He was pretty happy about them, and he even made me smell the inside to smell the fermented drops of beer.

2.) This is a blacklight. I always found blacklights to be fascinating, and this was cheap, stands on it's own, and came with the lightbulb.

3.) Mille Bornes! [French for A Thousand Miles] I used to play this game with my younger brother a lot, and totally forgot about it. When I saw it at the church, I got real excited again. It's great finding things from your past that you can use in your present.

4.) Some books. I have a real hard time passing up books. I had to stay far away from the library and their book sale, otherwise I would just come home with more books I won't get around to reading.

5.) I found this memo board at this house with a bunch of old style collectibles. They were probably the best house on the block. I figured that Don and I could write notes to each other on it, or a shopping lists, or honey-do lists, or my own personal to-do lists. I thought the roller girl was adorable. It's not exactly the look I'm going for, but I like it a lot.

6.) A little picture that says "Love is brining her flowers from her kitchen." I told Don that he better give me flowers from my kitchen if I buy it. He said "It has naked kids on it." Which is what makes it so irresistable.

7.) I bought this french lady for my Mom. She collects porcelain ladies, and she has a china style cookie jar from DiCamillo bakery, so I figured that this would go nice somewhere.

8.) These are two stacks of postcards, one is postcards from Ireland and the other is cheerleader postcards. I have collected post cards since I was at least 9 years old. I have about 300 in my collection now, not including these. I thnk postcards are always a great find at junk sales, since they're just not that popular. So even though I'm not interested in the topic, I still wanted them.

9.) I had to buy this little girl reading because she was so cheap. I read on a blog [that I can't find] how someone repainted these old figurines into funky colors, I wanted to do that to this little girl! Paint her purple or something! Unfortunently, minutes before I started this blog, I found out that her head fell off...

10.) This is an ashtray of [I think] a woman in the ocean. Don and I have promised each other to only have cool ashtrays in our apartment, and this is the first one. We saw another cool ashtray that had a drunk englishman holding onto a light pole about to hurl. We were going to buy it if it weren't $8.

11.) Some pins. One is a sunflower that looks like it's from the 70's, a bust of a victorian woman, and a Jones soda pin!

I am currently very exhausted, sun burnt, and my elbow hurts from lugging treasures around town [because Don wouldn't]. So I'm going to leave it at this; if you don't go to thrift stores, garage sales, swap meets, and flea markets, it's about time to. You never know what you'll find. One mans trash IS another man's treasure, and another man's after that.

Here's some pictures from the day.