Sold to the Highest Bidder!

It's been another fun summer weekend!  The weekend kicked off with the painting of the kitchen.  It's not put back together yet as there are some places that will be touched up tomorrow, but there will be pictures soon!  

Friday night, we enjoyed an evening of some seriously good mojitos, pizza, and dessert.  As good as the mojitos were, the company was even better.

Last week, David delivered a dumpster to an auction site.  He thought I needed to see this place for myself, so on Saturday we went to the auction.  He had done a great job of describing the place, but it really was something one needs to see to believe!  The man who had lived at the house was a collector of...everything.  Some might say a hoarder, but it wasn't like the hoarding shows we've watched on TV.  This was all very organized. 

 There's an Amish community nearby, and when we pulled up, this horse was waiting patiently in the woods.

 This is just the teeniest sample of this place.  There were several outbuildings like this one, and the outside and inside of each had small shelves covering every surface.  Each shelf was filled to overflowing with plates, mugs, jars, bells, and figurines.  Inside the larger shop building was an incomprehensible amount of stuff...all organized.  The two house trailers on the property were also filled, as was another barn.  One large section of the 15 acres looked a little like a lumber yard - all sorts of building supplies all sorted by size and type.  There were too many outbuildings to count...all full.  I've never seen anything like it.  To sell each item individually would have taken weeks, so they auctioned off groups of things - such as the entire contents of the outside walls of each building.

 I'd spotted an ironstone platter near the bottom of one of the outside walls of a building, but I sure didn't want to buy EVERYTHING on the outside.  Once that building sold, they announced that the man who bought it would sell individual pieces if anyone was interested.  David found him for me and he accepted my great offer of $3 for the platter.  He marked in sold in the layers of dirt. :)

 I was excited to bring it home and clean it up.  Under that dirt was a pretty old platter with just one small chip.

Now rather than get dirtier and dirtier every time it rains, it sits shiny and clean at the back of the top shelf of my ironstone collection.  I've bought all those pieces at flea markets, but that piece definitely has the best story!

There were some other things we were interested in there, but there was SO much stuff and they didn't seem to be getting any closer to the flatbed trailers where our treasures sat, so we came on home.  The ticks and mosquitoes weren't the only things biting out in the woods though - I think we've both been bitten by the auction bug!