Unexpected Free Things

The neighbors across the street were having a yard sale today. Of course, I'm nosey and I see a bunch of people in the driveway so I wandered over to see what goodies they have.

Nothing much caught my eye except for a string of lights with cool little tin shades. I think, "that'll look great on the porch, very festive." So I buy all three of them and take my treasure home. Unfortunately, upon closer inspection, one of the strings is missing 3 of the little tins so I took it back over to get my money back on that one. While I'm there, Jay joins me unexpectedly....no doubt to see what kind of crap I'm bringing home this time. Turns out we get into quite a conversation with the two neighbors Wayne and Richard because Richard is from right outside Pittsburgh and we all start talking about "back East" and then about all the other neighbors and the houses and whose house looks good and whose house looks like crap and what happened to that old lady across the street and do the busses make our house shake too? They were super nice, and then it turns out that Wayne sells custom made honeycomb cellular blinds and he has a whole bunch of them that people changed their mind on, so he says whatever we want we can just take. We took two small ones for the side windows in the living room, a bigger one for the other side of the living room and one for the skylight in the upstairs loft.

These blinds are awesome! At the MINIMUM it would have cost us over $50 each just for the small ones. And not only does he give them to us for free, but he came over to install them too!

We put the lights up on the porch and it looks great. We're having a small wine and cheese tasting party next month and the porch will be a nice place to hang out for the smokers, especially once I put a bunch of candles out there.

Lights on the porch. We continue to become Seattle.

The pictures give some idea of what it looks like, but it's not the greatest. Pay no attention to the dead flowers.