Car Booty and a Mammouth Task

Yesterday, I finally managed to get to my first car boot sale of this year. I love car boot sales. I love finding bargains and things that people don't want any more and turning them into them into things I can use in my house but, what with the weather being so awful lately, most of them have been cancelled. Yesterday I was in luck. Unfortunately I didn't find much but that's how it is sometimes but it was still nice to get out of the house for a couple of hours. 

This is all I found today, it cost a whole 20p :-) a true bargain. I can't decide whether to paint it or leave looking rustic. In fact I'm having a bit of a dither all round just now because I have embarked on the EPIC task of decorating the house ....... from top to bottom. Well, technically from bottom to top but lets not quibble. I have started in the hall and I will be going from room to room, painting, finishing jobs that have been left for way too long and finally getting my house looking nice and how I want it.

I have a plan. The plan is this ........ everything that doesn't move is going to be painted white. Once everything is painted white, doors, walls, ceilings, beams ........ everything, I can then decide what colours I am going to introduce into the rooms. At the moment, things are a real mishmash and I just can't live with it any more. It was like that when we moved in. All the woodwork has been stained dark brown. not a nice brown, just an ugly, dark, depressing brown. Some of the doors have been stained a different brown and the beams are another shade of ...... yep you guessed it ...... brown. I hate brown. The problem is that I just never had the money to do it all and I don't really have the money to do it now but I am determined to do it no matter what and I am going to start painting and I'm not going to stop 'til it's done. 

So watch this space. I will be posting before and after pictures after I finish each room. 

Hopefully :-)

Car Booty and An Unexpected Visitor

We are well into the swing of the car boot sales this year and apart from a couple of days when the weather was wet, I have been happily trundling along to my favourite one at 7am every Sunday morning. This morning was no exception and I managed to grab some lovely bargains. My best bargain this week was a beautiful 100% cashmere scarf for an amazing 50p! I love scarves, I have hundreds of them and I love how they can change a plain outfit into something fabulous and they come in really handy at the market when the weather turns cold. I have a sneaky suspicion though that the nice young gentleman who sold me the scarf will be getting a bit of a telling off from his girlfriend when she finds out how much he sold it to me for because most of the stuff on their table was obviously good quality and it was all quite pricey. She had left him manning the stall while she went and grabbed a cup of tea and he was having a whale of a time selling off everything for 50p and a pound. 

I also found a beautiful hand thrown bowl for £1

And some amazing fabrics, trimmings and embroidery thread for £2 and she even threw in the basket!

I also found out why the chickens had started to lay their eggs outside recently. As I was cleaning out their house this morning I discovered this cute little chap buried under the hay in the nesting box! The chickens are obviously are none too keen on sharing their house with him so he was relocated to the bushes near the pond in my field :-)

Garden Lovliness and the Start of my Favourite Time of Year

I had a lovely day in the garden yesterday. It was sunny with a gentle breeze and I pottered about to my hearts content. I planted my cucumbers into bigger pots and did the same to my courgettes. I also potted on my tomato plants, again into bigger pots and moved some of my other stuff around. I haven't found a spot for my rosa rugosa yet but I have discovered that it has some pretty mean thorns! Still, that should come in handy to keep the nasty neighbours at bay. I think I am going to plant it along the boundary fence that runs down the side of my house between my house and their driveway. It will look lovely when the flowers bloom and I will be able to see them from my kitchen window.

I'm very behind with my veg planting. Not only is my garden completely out of control at the moment but the weather down here has been so cold. Even yesterday morning, there was frost on the windscreen of my car when I went out at about 7.30am. This brings me to the other part of the title. My favourite time of the year ............. Car Boot Sale Season. For those of you who don't know, I am a bit of a carbootaholic. I love rummaging about to find a bargain and I love the atmosphere of the whole thing, particularly the mandatory Sunday morning bacon butty from the catering van ....... you can smell the deliciousness as soon as you get out of the car. So it was with great glee that a hopped out of bed at 6.30am yesterday morning to give the dogs a quick run in the field before setting off to my nearest car boot sale. It was the third one of the season and so far, I have bought some preserving jars for 50p, three fabulous brass wall lights for £4 which are destined to be sold on to a lady I know, a cut glass trinket pot with a cute little pointy lid for 20p, a china teacup and saucer for 50p which is destined to be made into a candle and some wonderful unmounted rubber stamps for £1 per pack. Quite a haul and quite a bargain. I was back home by about 9.30am and as I said in the post yesterday, I had to wait a while before I could start clattering around in the garden. Fingers crossed for some more fine days so I can try and get my garden under control again :-)

Anyway, here are some more pictures I snapped in my garden in the early morning sun. 

Kirstie's Vintage Home

I am a huge fan of Kirstie Allsop. I love all the fabulous ideas on her programs and I love the gorgeous ideas in her crafty books so it was with great excitement, last Thursday evening, that I sat down with a lovely glass of wine to watch her latest offering, Kirstie's Vintage Home. I loved her Vintage Home Workshop. I wish my craft room was half as fabulous as that and in general, I really loved her ideas but I have to confess to I was slightly disappointed by the program. I felt slightly let down that the crafts were very similar to the crafts that have been featured in previous series. I also felt that while some of the up-cycling was nicely done, some of the spending was a little excessive, such as spending £50 on new knobs for the chest of drawers in the bedroom, not to mention how much the wallpaper in the bedroom must have cost!. Although ..... I guess it's their money and they can spend it how they wish and bedroom did look absolutely beautiful. I have to say though, I am really looking forward to the rest of the series and her latest book will most certainly be on my Christmas Wish List.

As I have said before, I'm a bit of a thrifty person, mostly out of necessity, and I prefer to find bargains for the things I need in my house, even if it means waiting a while for the right thing to come along. I love charity shops, junk shops and car boot sales and I love eBay both for buying and for selling things I no longer need. Earlier this year, I manage to find some fabulous ceramic knobs with Cath Kidson-esque flowers on them for the bargain price of £1.00 for 25 knobs from a local car boot sale (thats 4p per knob!!). I was utterly overjoyed because the cheapest I had found in my local DIY store were £3.99 per knob and as I have 21 doors and drawers in my kitchen, it would have cost me £83.79 to re-vamp my kitchen cupboards, an expense I couldn't possibly justify and certainly couldn't afford. And here they are, my mega-bargain door knobs ....... one of my best car boot sale finds I think.

Oh No ...... No More Car Booty

Well today was a sad day indeed. It was the last car boot sale of the season. I have no idea what I am going to do without my Sunday morning car boot sales and bacon butties until next April when one of them starts up again. The other, alas, doesn't start up until the middle of July, until the farmer has managed to get his hay cut and that all depends on the weather! I did grab a couple of bargains though. I found a lovely blue woollen blanket for £2.00 from the car boot sale near Looe for Levi, my Dalmation to snuggle up in this winter and a gorgeous hand painted teapot from the car boot sale at Kernow Mill, also for £2.00, which will look lovely on my dresser when I have finished transforming it with the amazing Annie Sloan paint.

There was also an added bonus at the Kernow Mill sale. A lovely old gentleman with his owls. I love owls. At night, when I take the dogs out, there seems to be hundreds of hooting, tooting, screeching owls in the trees all around my house and I love hearing them. I have also seen them on several occasions swooping silently down the valley on the hunt for mice. 

The owls were absolutely gorgeous, so soft and fluffy, particularly the little brown fluffy one sat on his perch with his little grey friend. The owls travel around the county in the back of a white transit van which has been fitted out with perches. 

The little grey owl in the picture above is apparently a burrowing owl! So cool. I was chatting to another old gentleman who told me he and his wife had 3 owls of their own. A barn owl, a little grey burrowing owl and one like the one with tufty ears in the third picture above. Lucky man. I have cats, dogs and llamas and soon there will be chickens and in our time we have a whole host of other animals such as  rats, hamsters, gerbils, ducks and rabbits but nothing so glorious as an owl. 

I have owl envy :-)

One final note. When I nipped back into Launceston yesterday to pick up the rest of my Annie Sloan Paint, I discovered that there are lots of nice charity shops in the town and basically I can't walk past a charity shop without taking a peek. I know it's rather early to be mentioning Christmas but the simple fact is, that if I don't start preparing for it now, it just sneaks up on me and I end up running around like a lunatic getting stressed and frazzled and not very Christmassy at all. Each year, we have a different colour theme on our Christmas tree. Last year year it was gold and silver and the year before it was fuchsia pink, turquoise and Lime green (sounds yucky but it looked absolutely awesome) but this year I was struggling to figure out what colour to do. Until I spotted these in a Launceston charity shop.

I got 7 reindeer tumblers, 8 cotton napkins embroidered with reindeer and a fabulous table runner for the amazing price of £9.50. So, this year, our Christmas theme is red and white with probably a hint of glitter and glitz thrown in for good measure. 

Time to Start Knitting a Scarf.

While indulging in my secret obsession a few weeks ago, on a beautifully balmy Sunday morning, I was startled to see a whole flock of birds, in a classic V shape formation, heading out over the sea. About three or four years ago, when we had a really bad winter, I saw a similar thing. Hundreds of birds in V shape formations flying South to sunnier climes in August. At the time, I mentioned to some friends that I thought it was going to be a really bad winter and they just laughed at me and told me I was insane. Lo and behold, snow! It snowed and it snowed and then it snowed some more and the whole country was brought to a standstill and I was snowed in for 10 days. It happened again the following year. The birds flew south in August and once again snow, ice and a two week lock-down in my snow covered valley. Last year however, the birds were still here in late September and they didn't pack their bags and leave until early October and we had a really mild winter down here in Cornwall with hardly a flake of snow to be seen. Typical really because last August, in anticipation of a bad winter, I bought Chuck the Truck, an ancient 4x4 Pajero built for Cornwall in the depths of winter in a blizzard!

Since writing the above bloggery, about 3 weeks ago, I have also noticed another curious thing happening, which, in my humble opinion, points to the coming winter being particularly harsh. My house is being invaded by spiders! And when I say spiders, I don't mean the ones that are small and dainty with a delicate little web in some distant corner, I'm talking about spiders that are mean and menacing and look as if they eat small cats for breakfast! They are at least the size of a saucer (well at least 3cm) with huge hairy bodies and giant hairy legs and they appear in the middle of the night so that when I wake up in the morning they are looming over my head giving me the fright of my life. Understandably, the first few times I awoke to find a giant spider eyeing me as if I was a tasty morsel, I freaked out and much leaping and bed bouncing would follow as I attempted to squish the little bugger with a book while attempting to avoid the inevitable panic as the spider falls off the ceiling onto the floor and begins making a dash for my ankles. However, there have now been so many spiders over the last few weeks that I have refined my spider squashing technique and it is now down to a fine art. Firstly, I grab a can of hairspray. Any kind will do but I find the cheapest brands have to best sticking power and I give the spider a quick blast of super-strength, hold-your-hair-in-place-in-a-hurricane hairspray, rendering the evil spider immobile and glued to the ceiling, thus eliminating the ankle biting scenario because the spider can no longer fall off the ceiling. I then grab a long piece of wood, which I find useful for squishing from a much greater distance, and voila ...... no more spider. The downside of all this squishing, of course, is that my once pristine white bedroom walls are now liberally covered in squished spiders that need scraping off on a regular basis ..... in my opinion, a small price to pay for spider free sleep.

Anyway only time will tell whether this winter is going to be a bad one but I for one will be stocking up on coal and logs and stuffing the freezer full of food just in case!

Here are some snowy facts for you courtesy of the good old Met Office. 

• On 25 September 1895 snow was reported to have fallen at London and Wallington in Surrey making it the earliest fall of snow on the capital.

• On 2 June 1975 snow showers forced the abandonment of several cricket matches across the country.
• The snowiest winter of the twentieth century in the United Kingdom was 1947. Between 22 January and 17 March snow fell every day somewhere in the country.
• The most disastrous avalanche in the United Kingdom occurred in Lewes, East Sussex on 27 December 1836. Eight people were killed and several houses were destroyed.

Cornwall in the Snow 18th December 2010

My Secret Addiction!

Those of you who know me well will know that I have a secret addiction. I totally LOVE car boot sales. On Sunday mornings, during the summer months, I get up at 6.30am when most normal, sane human beings are still snoozing in their nice comfy beds and I drive to a field near Looe in Cornwall to go to my favourite car boot sale. Every year I wait with baited breath for a few fine days at the start of July so the farmer who owns the field can harvest the silage crop and the email that pings into my inbox to tell me the car boot sales are about to begin.  My bargains over the years have been considerable. A spectacular stone statue of Poseidon for £35 (haggled down from £70 which, considering I never haggle, was quite an achievement), a fabulous brand new leather handbag with a RRP of £85 for £3, and a John Rocha top bought for £1 which I then managed to sell on Ebay for £15 to mention but a few. This morning though, as I switched my alarm off and made the all-important call to the car boot sale hotline to check if it was on or not, I began to wonder whether or not I should be worried about the fact that I look forward to rootling through other peoples junk. Having thought about this long and hard I have come to the conclusion that car boot sales are basically upcycling at it's very best. Things which no-one wants any more get a nice new home and a few quid can be made at the same time to help in this economic mess that our country is in. I think this is one of the primary reasons I don't haggle. I have always assumed that people who sell at car boot sales do so in order to raise a bit of spare cash. It seems wrong somehow to haggle them down from what they must have considered a fair price just so I can save 50p. I also never go to car boot sales to sell things. Although I have done in the past, it was a thoroughly depressing experience and one I'm not keen to repeat. People go to car boot sales for a bargain and realistic pricing is not an option because things just don't sell. I find I can get more for them by selling them on Ebay or giving them to my local vintage shop  to sell for me in return for a small percentage of the price. When I go to a car boot sale I have a strategy. Firstly ...... and most importantly ...... I have a bacon buttie. The smell of sizzling bacon wafting from the catering truck is too much to resist and I find a good breakfast is essential for maintaining the energy levels vital for mounting a successful car boot sale forage.  Secondly, I have a quick whizz round looking for things that instantly catch my eye and I weigh up whether or not I want them, either for myself or to sell on Ebay. Lastly, I have a slow walk around the tables looking in greater detail and looking not only on the tables but under, around and to the side because for some reason, car boot sellers have a habit of just dumping stuff all over the place and it's very easy to miss a fabulous bargain if you don't have a good rummage around. When I spot something that I like, I ask the price. I have to say that, out of necessity, I'm very strict when it comes to buying things. If they are too expensive I walk away and as I said, I never haggle. Except on one notable occasion. My statue of Poseidon. I fell in love with it the moment I saw it but the seller wanted £70 for it. Rule Number 1 for car boot sales ....... never take more money with you than you want to spend. I never take more than £20. That way I know that's all I can spend. That week, however, I had just finished a shift at the camp site where I used to work and I had my pay packet in my bag. It was fate! Knowing that £70 was way more than I would be willing to pay I thanked him and started to walk away. The owner then started haggling with me! He kept lowering the price until he finally said £35 and I will help you take it to your car! Well how could I resist. It took two of us to wedge it into the foot well of my car and a wheelbarrow and an awful lot of sweat and swearing for me to take it out and put it on my patio when I got back home. It looks fabulous just in front of my gate guarding the house and it is still my favourite car boot sale find. 

So now you know ..... My Name Is Kay and I am A Car Bootaholic! :-)

Some of my many Car Boot Sale Bargains

My Wonderful Poseidon Statue

Gorgeous Hurricane Lanterns £1 for the pair.

Fabulous Puffin Print 20p

Bamboo Magazine Rack £1.50

Fantastic Tweed Bag £1

Porcelain Soup Tureen (for my collection|) £2

Awesome Girly Spirit Level 20p