Weekly Yard Sale Report and Southwest/James North Wanderings

It's the long Victoria Day Weekend here in Canada and I don't think the weather could be any nicer! It was a perfect Saturday morning for hitting the yard sale circuit on my bike and I had eight sales on my list to check out.

Since I have a lot more local readers than I did many moons ago when I started these yard sale reports (and thanks to CBC Hamilton it's not exactly a secret that I live in The Hammer so my "blogger anonymity", if I ever had any, is totally shot) I've decided it would be fun to add some more local references to these posts. So, non-local readers, I love you, too - you just might not always know what I'm talking about, but you might get to know a lot more about the city I live in :)

I started off the morning at a sale on Aberdeen. I didn't buy anything there, but working my way towards Locke Street I encountered this little fellow on the porch:

I then headed slightly northeast to check out a sale on Herkimer, and scored this beauty:

A Lagostina Dutch oven - the holy grail of cookware. I've been dreaming of finding a good quality Dutch oven at a yard sale for years, so to say I was excited about this find would be a slight understatement. We recently had to throw out a pot we'd been using for 20 years (my sister-in-law was going to throw it out all that time ago and we managed to get two more decades of regular use out of it). This is a more than worthy successor to our expired pot, that's for sure.  I paid $4 for it and went (very) happily on my way!

This particular yard sale was located right in my old stomping grounds. I lived near Queen & Herkimer for several years, in this place:

It's nearly unrecognizable from the time I lived there. It used to have a green stucco exterior, and I'm pretty sure that large evergreen tree wasn't there when I was. I guess a lot can change in 15 years :) We lived in the main floor apartment on the right hand side of this semi-detached house.

I headed further north and backtracked a bit west to get to a sale on Dundurn north, where I didn't buy anything. Making my way further northeast, I happened to spy this:

Was someone hoping to do their grocery shopping at Victoria Park? Maybe they can come back a bit later in the growing season and barter for some veggies from a member of the Victoria Park Community Gardens. I'm not even sure where that cart would have come from as there are no grocery stores in the immediate vicinity.

Here was the scene at York and Bay just after 9 a.m. this morning:

 Is EVERYONE at the cottage? By the time I made it home I concluded that everyone that's still in the city was either hitting up yard sales (they were all doing a brisk business), strolling down James North, or exploring the Waterfront Trail.

From York and Bay I wove my way towards the James North area. I stopped to check a sale on Bay North, and while I enjoyed a stimulating conversation with the proprietor, I didn't buy anything. My next stop was a sale on MacNab North, where I found these:

I got these spoons for ten cents apiece, which I think is one heck of a deal. The smaller spoon in the middle (I'm told it's a jam spoon, and it will look right at home serving up our homemade jam from a Mason jar) is definitely real silver and I'm pretty sure the larger ones are, too. They need a bit of cleaning up, but I've been meaning to polish our silver (inherited from my hubby's grandmother) for ever and a day anyhow, so hopefully this is the incentive I need to finally get the job done.

I then made a stop on Mulberry Street, where I found the coolest thing I DIDN'T buy this morning:

A selection of retro frames!

By then the day was really starting to heat up and I was starting to run out of steam, but I pressed onwards to check out one more sale on James North before taking the Waterfront Trail back to Westdale.

The view from Burlington and Bay this morning:

After making it back to my own neck of the woods, I stopped at one final sale where, miraculously, I didn't buy any books even though they had a ton of them.

That pretty much sums up this morning's adventures!

Grand total for the day: $4.30 for 4 items, or an average of $1.08 an item.

Did you find anything great this weekend?