plots for the new year....

i hope you all have a good junk/antique place to go to...if you cant come here to see us... JON AND I GOT 2 BOXTRUCK LOADS OF STUFF SATURDAY...COME SEE..

my business plot is to go back to our roots....im going to try and go to more sales and more of the places where i can get neat old stuff.....and not so much of the new things....im sick of trying to sell stuff thats in hobby lobby for half of what i need to sell it for....the whole gift world is a big mess...the companies want to sell to me and also to tjmaxx at a lower price and its not working out....

i think we all want to buy american but how can we afford to? also how can we afford not to?

so for me its back to more of the antique /used /recycled world...or in todays terms, the vintage shabby world...

the problem is the new buyers dont really care much about or want to pay for the good things that i would like to stock...like flow blue, good crocks, nippon, bisque dolls, name brand pottery ..i always say my new customers, who i dearly care about and need, dont know the difference between majolica and made in japan....meaning they dont want or understand or care about the stuff we used to sell so well....and of course most of my old customers dont need any more....so it leaves me in a wierd place where the things i know best are kind of irrelevant....

so it should be an interesting adventure trying to buy the right things....or make the right things.... i know our customers love to see lots of stuff and thats one thing i love to come up with...

one other small problem...the economy sucks so i am definitely going to try very hard to have cheaper prices this year!!!!

p.s. if you are so young that you dont recognize the guys pictured above , its sanford and son... old time fun tv junk dealers...

big pile coming in

just in....3 bedroom sets, with nice vanities, 3 tier table, big oak secretary, small cheap oak secretary, nice mahogany secretary, dining room set,lots of lamps, gold mirrors, stemware, garden statuary, matched pair of iron urns, ruby red stemware, ash cupboard with paned windows,park bench, old stoplights, some books, little french box, lots of buffets, set of gold silverware...oak sideboard... lots of purple glass...neat pictures....a cute little red icebox.... thats about it,,,

AFTER CHRISTMAS SALE

NOW we have a short big after christmas sale..going thru next weekend...... all the remaining christmas is half off.....its all rounded up in one room and looks like a big merry pile....we sent out emails and hope a lot of people come and buy up for next year....especially if you like RED and purple....there is a lot of that left!!!
naturally im ready to tear up the whole store and rearrange everything.. i love this time of year..our poor key west room is all crunched up to make room for christmas...and also our dish section....so we have lots of work to do to get the store back together.....
....tomorrow im going to a big sale so i should have a whole new pile of good stuff next week....

if you want to see a nice visual history of christmas balls go see my friend susan on http://www.thedutchrose.blogspot.com/

iced in and a nice customer

we didnt even open today...the ice storm hit us hard..no electric from 6:00am till 6:00 pm..so it was mainly home in my pink rooom/office sorting out all the stuff i have been avoiding etc etc....a nice day...

we left our phone # out in the parking lot at the store just in case someone tried to come see us....and 2 guys did come...one with stuff to sell me....kind of window/tool trash to treasure creation....he called me on the phone and came over to the house....

. ... and the other was a nice husband out to get my caterpillar...i had decided to keep him...i love its expression and wanted it up on the roof greeting customers or home in my garden....... .....but the guy on the phone was funny and sweet... he said he was the fat guy with the good looking wife.and she wanted it bad her grandpa was a cobbler...[see the feet}!!! ..and his whole house was full of green oak stuff...SO I TOTALLY CAVED...

.i didnt even have to go over, we negotiated the price and he paid by credit card and loaded it by himself...its about 5 ft long!!! soooooo

goodbye dear caterpillar.....he found a new home today.....

orphans

here are some orphan ideas i have and cant make happen..so far anyway!!!! if i was older i might call it my bucket list....

1. A SELLING SITE where i could sell vintage piles of stuff for altered artists ...like 100 buttons, 20 cups and saucers, 50 old hinges, 20 little wood turnings.30 spindles.....and so much more....impediments, cant decide if it would be worth the effort...we have the stuff...

2. a ROAD TRIP with $50,000 a semi and 2 big guys , we would go out east and find the great junk shops with all kinds of neat stuff and to the big shows ...barrier, money....our customers would love it....

3.BUY A MALL, its available, on a highway in a great location and remake it into a green oak annex.....problems no money and no staff...we have the stuff and the idea...

4.a DECADE MUSEUM...with big rooms for each decade from 1880 on...it would be so much fun to fill.....impediments, money....

5..do a big show with our neatest archetectural cabinets and counters....impediments, dh and hes probably right...here we are in one of the cheapest states with good low indiana prices and we cant get to the big markets where our stuff would look like a wonderful bargain...my kids, jon and julie used to do them but shes gone to bella chic and hes got 4 kids...i cant even get to kane county....let alone roundtop or some big thing in california....

6. putting my basement ALTERED ART PROJECTS on the market.....so far they are just sitting down there festering ...no way has bubbled to the top yet....

7. write a book...this one is getting satisfied daily with this blog....thanks for reading!!

8.USE OUR HIGHWAY FRONTAGE LOCATION...we have it but we cant be in 2 places at once, cant staff 2 places, cant build another place....so there it sits ....its right on us 31...
9. a turret hooked onto the back of the house towork in....

those are a few of my ORPHAN IDEAS ....just waiting to be hatched out and given a chance....just waiting for someone to jump on the band wagon and make them happen with me.... dh covers his ears, jon is swamped, julie has deserted us,.we never want another partnership...... we are all swamped ...so it all seems pretty unlikely... but you never want to say never!!!

the store today

all day we rearranged and fluffed up the store.......getting ready for the weekend..

.jon got lots of neat stuff today....a fancy 20s china cabinet, a big old wardrobe trunk, the kind that opens like a book, ...we got another harvest table and a big dark counter and more small shabby window cabinets...from the amish we got 2 nice mission bookcases ...see above..

we sold a few pieces that kind of mixed up the whole store...so thats always good and always a challenge to get it put back together...

we are going to have an after christmas sale.....on quite a bit of the remaining christmas stuff...

it was a good day, we got lots done..including our inventory..what a job...we started monday.....

.or on the dark side, its easy to get a lot done when there arent very many customers....but we expect that in december ...

i dont know how to get rid of the blank spot below...i know how it appeared, i deleted 2 pictures...

this is so hard for me...i just dont get how to work the spacing function....im sure there is one....

my best buy ever

this is the probably the best buy i ever made...it was in a box of pictures at an auction....luckily i had studied enough not to sell it for 2$...and we kept it...... when jon was little a guy offered us 5,000 for it and we said no.really suprising jon....it wasnt about the money to us.....we were so poor then back in the good old days..... its a fractur....a handpainted picture from 1801....
30 yrs later we sold it to help buy our cottage ..and it brought about what the guy offered us......dang i miss that picture...

OOPS..dh says i forgot my best buy ever , so far... ....it was a cubs program from the year they won the world series..1908 ?.. ......i bought a pile of paper for i think $200, from one of my customers and brought the baseball stuff in to dh...he loves baseball......that brought about 10,000 at a new york auction......also into the cottage fund....

what ive learned about price guides...

we probably have 200 antique price guides......we used to buy several copies of the general guide, schroeders, so we would have one in every truck and ever handy at any buying situation..we also have lots of specific guides.... they used to matter a lot.....several of our buyers would buy by the book so we did too, especially in depression glass , elegant glass and pottery...

.....now it seems like they were so wrong and maybe led us in the antique world over the edge in pricing our stuff. .making most things priced higher than the real market would bear..............maybe it was ebay that proved this to everybody, maybe style change

anyway a huge majority of the prices out there in the antique world today are way lower than the guides say...

now ...IN GENERAL, i think the guides are almost always innacurate....if i could get 50% of the prices in the guides i would be doing great....luckily i dont have to get 50% because i can buy way under that price....as anyone who goes to auctions knows..... the books turned out to be so wrong.....

the good thing is they might tell you what the rare thing is in any category, or good general background info......i keep and value lots of my old guides for that reason...

im very sure this theory can be appplied to the vast middle and lower parts of the antiques out there in the world..like most of the stuff i will ever find.......but in the very high parts, like the top 10% of any category, the super rare, the price guides might be a real help and maybe even way under in value....

IMHO

..ps...i never believe anything i read about antique prices in decorating mags.. outrageously bad sometimes

pss...you can see the real experts on the roadshow, the folks who have studied thier one field for years.......and realize how deep thier knowledge is... so different from the general appraiser at the charity event or in the motel room trying to buy your stuff......

psss....you can find out a lot from looking your thing up on ebay... not the asking price but the selling price......

new project...old fence and old tin

we have been busy figuring out how to combine our old parts into attractive signs...here we've used old fence panels and some tin ceiling tin .....these are about 5ft long..except the bar sign......my theory on making stuff is, if its small it can come from china for pennies....so i want to make big!!! lisa made these.... will they sell? time will tell.......

NEW PROJECT...

when its slow we still work....this winter im hoping to make a new line of signs..... fun ones for our customers...... so im looking for fun , short sayings ...dh was sweet, i showed him the WING IT sign, and he said, isnt that what weve been doing for 30 yrs? they are on recycled door panels........today we painted a wall for their new home..in the KEY WEST room of course....... wade is the artist .....

more store

CUSTOMERS TODAY..one who bought stuff for her elaborate party....she picked all my tall glass cake plates,and then added antique silver and cloches of different sizes and then fun stuff to put in the cloches....i hope she sends me a picture....she built laid out staggered layers of silver and glass for her party island ...and made tall tidbit servers out of the antique cake plates...with old silver platters underneath....

the other big customer of the day....dug deep into the rough room and the awning for lots of neat parts and projects.... i think he has a plot....but i dont know what it is yet.... he picked out beautiful orphans and hes a great woodworker with a good eye for design so it should be fabulous..

home alone

.

home alone today....so cold , hardly any customers...ive stayed on the couch all day blog hopping and napping...
have been on all my political places and chat places and got caught up on our magazines... and then found this fun site
http://murphydesign1.blogspot.com/2008/10/know-exhibition-preview-part-one.html

also found eberts site http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/frontpage i like his reviews but sure miss siskel..

also see here for a big old fashioned christmas wreath with old christmas balls, over on http://www.robolady.blogspot.com/

i did work a little on the phone, and found out we are getting our neat old mexican sugar molds back in on monday... the neat rustic ones that hold the big votives....
also from the couch, we worked on and sent out our december email...with a freebie...
we are totally fluffed up for the weekend...

our snowman in the christmas room above....

antique trash to treasure

heres a neat trash to treasure creation...the head was once on a chinahead doll...by the hairdo we know its turn of the century.... it had a cloth body and a nice shoulder plate..and china hands and feet....the head probbly got broken off the shoulderplate.....so, they made it into a pincusion....

we have had pincusions made out of broken kerosene lamps too...

our house in the woods...a pretty morning and my snow covered garden...i wish the snow lasted around here...but usually its gone and we go back to dull grey and brown...

so its, enjoy it while you can...