Weekly Yard Sale Report: Southwest Yard Sale-o-Rama

Today was a big day on my yard sale calendar: the day of the annual Beulah Street Sale. This street in the southwest part of Hamilton has run an annual sale for so many years that it's become a tradition for a large number of local residents to stop by and hunt for bargains.

This event is such a big draw that a lot of other folks in the area piggyback onto it and run their own yard sales on the same day. So there were an overwhelming number of sales to check out today, even for a seasoned yard sale shopper like myself. The good news is they were clustered together in a very tight area, so I didn't have to do a whole lot of riding around to hit a fantastic number of sales (there were so many I didn't even try to keep count!).

My first stops of the morning were to check out a street sale plus another yard sale in my own Westdale neighbourhood. I bought these two books for 25 cents each:

The puzzle book will go into our "camping entertainment" stash, and the paper book is going into my gift cupboard.

Then I rounded up the family and we all headed over to the Beulah Street Sale (and hit up a bunch of sales on Dundurn South on the way over)..

I've never come home empty handed from this event, and this year was no exception!

 We found: a pair of hockey pants for my 12 year old son ($15), set of 4 drinking glasses ($2), book on how to make handmade books and journals ($1), dinosaur block puzzle (going in my gift cupboard) ($1), clear glass engraved bottle (50 cents).

On Beulah I also found The Mother of All Free Piles and after rooting around in it I came up with a huge armload of stuff:

 Those of you who've been reading my yard sale reports for a long time know how much I LOVE free piles :) I found so much great stuff in this one I was a bit embarrassed to take it all. The woman running the sale insisted that I take as much as I wanted from it as she just wanted to get rid of it all (she even went and got me a big bag to hold everything). Yep, every single item in the photo above was out of that free pile: Four Christmas baskets, two packages of cellophane basket wrap, a Christmas wine bottle wrap, a package of gift tags, a package of Christmas stickers, a package of cheesecloth, a package of elastic ribbon, a Christmas dishcloth, and a cute little salt and pepper shaker set (they're going to be our picnic/camping set). Nearly everything is still brand new in unopened packages! I was running low on wrapping supplies after last Christmas, so this has significantly replenished my stash.

The salt and pepper shakers up close - they're only three inches tall. So adorable! And hopefully, functional, too.

The rest of the family had had their fill of yard sales by then, so they headed home and left me to check out the rest of the sales on my list on my own. I headed over to Stanley Avenue to check out a couple of sales and found:

A pair of size 10 knitting needles (25 cents) which I'm hoping are big enough to experiment with knitting T-shirt yarn, and a pack of 20 Christmas cards ($1)

From there, I headed towards home, hitting up a couple more sales on Charleton and a street sale on Linwood without buying anything else, although I found the coolest thing I *didn't* buy today on Linwood:

This is a sheet music cupboard, but I can think of a lot of other great uses for it. I had to restrain myself from buying it, but I really don't have anywhere to put it right now (and we've got enough furniture waiting for an overhaul at the moment, so I don't want to add more until we've dealt with what we've already got!)

I also passed by St Joseph's church in my travels this morning...

...and got to meet fellow Hamilton blogger Tamara of Tea for Three (and one of her adorable daughters). I even bought something from her yard sale, but I won't tell you what as I'm sure she doesn't need everyone in the Blogosphere knowing where she lives :)

Grand total for the day: $21.25 for 25 items, or 85 cents an item

(If I remove the "big ticket" hockey pants from the equation, it works out to 26 cents an item for the other 24 items!)

Did you find anything great this week?