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?

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?