Thy Neighbor’s Yard Sale

“Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s house…nor any thing that is thy neighbor’s.”

Exodus 20:17

But what if they’re having a yard sale?I think I’ve mentioned (more than) a few times that I have gotten some really good deals from my two neighbors’ yard sales. You can do amazing projects with yard sale items. But you knew that, right?Like the famous blue dresser, which I got for a mere $25 from my neighbor across the street. I got it to store puppet items and props for our Sunday school “drama group”. If you click on the link, you can see the whole story behind this, including (should it surprise you?) a bit of a misfortune involving Panda. And while you’re looking at this one, that chair on the right was given to me by my other neighbor from one of her yard sales.And here you see the “amazing chocolate mosaic vase”, which almost turned into a colossal “Pinterest fail”. The more I think about it, the more I wish I had bought that lamp too…Because I really didn’t need a giant mosaic vase, for the moment it’s been turned upside down and used as a plant stand for my famous succulents. (The two plant pots in the foreground were given to me by my “yard sale neighbors”.)Besides the things you buy at your neighbor’s yard sale, there are also the things they give you for free. This quail was given to me by the same neighbor who gave me the wooden chair you saw above. (Maybe people are starting to get the idea that if they really want to get rid of something, they should ask if I want it for a project?)Now that I’m all into mosaics, even tiny things like these pieces of costume jewelry are a great find. The frogs? They are just some of the many animal figurines that I can’t seem to resist. More yard sale finds. Pay no attention to the dryer lint behind the ducks…This is when they were getting ready to go to my house. (Truth in blogging: I did not buy the basket. I was just using it to carry my merchandise around.)

This blue baby changing table was another of the things my neighbors were selling that I just “had” to get. It just had “potential” written all over it. So far I haven’t done anything with it other than use it to store things on.

But just today I realized that this photo of a project I had saved on Pinterest a long time ago seems to be made out of an almost identical table.See how they made it into a little sink sort of thing? I looked at it and thought, “I could totally do that!” But we’ll see. Maybe this summer…

I really like this little elephant-thingy and the green plate. Somehow I think they could be made into something cute, especially since my goal is to decorate the guest room with elephants. So they are on my kitchen table as we speak, just waiting until I figure out what to make out of them.

Another $5 purchase from across the street. In fact I think this was my first one, and as you can see it still hasn’t been made into anything. I actually left it outside for too long and now it’s kind of coming apart, but it will still be cute when it becomes whatever it is going to become.

You can see the pink and white nightstand behind this table, both at the yard sale and then in my garage. I don’t remember if I bought them both on the same day. I imagined the table sanded down and painted bright yellow, but in fact it has kind of become a work space on the back patio.

The new work station. You’ll notice the “amazing-chocolate-vase-to-be” at the bottom left, and a mosaic turtle on the table. The turtles, whose story you can read by clicking here, have since met with a less than desirable fate…more on that at a later date.

Here are the hanging metal butterflies that my neighbor across the street gave me. I brought them home and hung them up in the garage, thinking I would paint them turquoise and put them in the back yard. Let’s just say that, while they may be in the back yard now, they are still not turquoise. I’m thinking now that maybe I should have bought the small plastic watering can in the background for a project that has been bouncing around in the back of my mind…

You’ve seen pictures of Foster and Panda in their “den”. It wasn’t a yard sale project exactly, but this “cat condo” was give to me in its original form (left) and I really like the way it turned out. There’s a blog post behind that here, in case you missed it.

So there you have it. The life of a hopeless yard sale project addict. But I don’t bother to go around town looking for yard sales. I just have to wait for my neighbors to have one!