House Hunting, Sarcoptic Mange, and Value Village

Well, Dear Reader(s), the time has come for me to give you a bit of bad news. It seems that you won't be reading blog posts composed from the sunny Echo Lake house after all, and your favorite blogger's couch will not be located across from a woodstove on the rock floor of a sunken living room grotto. You see, for the umpteenth time, the borrowed money of the Hale family has been deemed less worthy than the borrowed money of other families, simply because our money has been labeled as secured by the Veterans Administration. For the third time in a row, we've been told that no one wants to mess with the VA. In my worst pouting fit to date about this house business, I asked Scootchie (demandingly) what ever happened to that wave of patriotism everyone had? Of course the reality is this - we have no money for a downpayment and so MUST go VA, and the buyer who "won" our beautiful house was coming in with 20% down. Our offers to the seller were EXACTLY the same in terms of the money they would end up with, but those darn sellers understand how picky the VA can be. Damn! Damn! Damn!

So this morning we have yet another appointment with Real Estage Agent George, who has 7 or 8 houses in line for us to traipse through. We already have one in line for first place, but at this stage of the game I'm beginning to worry that the dreams of home ownership may end unfulfilled for the Hales. Woe is me.

To cheer myself last night I started admiring the loot I acquired the last time my Mom visited, when we stopped at a barn sale out in the boonies. For you city folk who might happen upon this blog of mine, a barn sale is not the sale of a barn, but rather it is a load of old dusty bits that have been placed into a barn for strangers to paw through. I don't know why, but for me, a barn sale can be the Holy Grail of the weekend sale-ing experience. There's a hierarchy in the sale spectrum, and barn sale is at the top for me. Some will argue that an estate sale is actually the Holy Grail, but I contend that estate sales are often over-priced, and not containing the bargains one is usually on the search for. This barn sale had us work for it's goodies, as we had to follow about fifty neon green signs to find the location. At first upon our arrival we found nothing of note. The barn was of the metal variety (not usually a good sign), and it was filled with tables of perfectly labeled ordinary items laid out nicely. Feeling let down by our exhausting journey, we were slowly making our way to the oversized exit, when we overheard a promising declaration from the principle money-taker; "don't leave before you see the other barn in the back."

And there it was, the motherlode.

The barn in the back was the ENORMOUS old RED wooden type, with lots of tables crammed FULL of miscellaneous OLD dusty, rusty, miscellaneous STUFF! And as a person who recently decided to collect vintage bottles of various bathroom-type remedies and cures for embarrassing problems, I hit the jackpot. So that's what I gazed at lovingly last night, while pining over yet another house that has passed through our lives, and the barn and shop turned gallery and art room that will never be. My wares are still dusty, as I'm scared to clean them. But in the end, I think they really help tie the room together.






And as for the Value Village part of my post, I'll have to leave that one for tomorrow. But let me whet your appetite by saying that it's a PROJECT, and it starts with this: