Finds This Week!

 Last Monday the children and I went for an early walk. Monday is Garbage Pick Up Day in our neighborhood. On a few occasions I have found quite decent treasures on the curb in the neighborhood where we live. One morning I found a box full of dishes; plates, bowls, and saucers. I liked some of them very much others were just okay. But, I kept all of the ceramic dishes because ours get broken frequently.

Some of my new dishes!

 Another day I was excited to pick up a cast iron skillet in perfectly good shape. 

A while ago I found a bread machine in very good condition with the manual and everything. It was sitting at the curb with a set of  4 upholstered dining chairs. I took the upholstery off of the chairs and am still waiting for an opportunity to recover them. The chairs are nice and sturdy.

Back to my story for this week,

I got the children dressed and put jackets on them. We took our wagon and went for a walk before the garbage truck came by. We went up and down 3 streets with no real success. I had only picked up a log that we could use in our open fire pit. I have had a fire a few nights recently. The weather has been just right for that sort of thing. 

At any rate, we were going down the 4th street on our way back home when we found a vacuum cleaner! It looked complete. It was really dirty looking on the inside, but it didn't look broken. I loaded it into the wagon and home we went.

"really dirty looking on the inside"

A few days later I cleaned it up. It was really quite nasty under the beater bar. But, after a little elbow grease with soap and water and an old tooth brush, I got it looking fairly nice.

 

Cleaning all the parts.

It works great! I am glad of that because my old vacuum was on it's last leg. You had to hold the handle just right to keep power running down to the head. The beater bar was always going on and off and on and off. My "new" vacuum makes the job much faster! What a great find!

My "new" vacuum!

We also went to a State Park this week and looked for neat rocks in the creek.

I found these two rocks that I thought were pretty unique.

This one makes me think of petrified wood.

And this one makes me think of reptile skin. I have never seen a rock like this. I am no geologist, though.

Have you found any treasurers scavenging or dumpster diving before? Tell me in the comments section!