Garage Sale

Last spring I decided to hold our annual garage sale in Cedar Rapids instead of Davenport.  I thought it would be nice for Molly to store all of the stuff instead of me this time.  It would also be nice to meet her neighbors if they came by.  As always, I encouraged friends and family to purge and give me their items to sell.    

The sale was a huge success but Molly said she never wanted to have another one at her house.  Garage sales can be stressful.  When I gave my friend the money she had earned she was ecstatic! She couldn't believe she made that much with just junk she had planned to donate.  She was so excited she asked if I would do another small pop up sale.  I told her I would but I wouldn't be able to accept her items and store them until I was done with the latest doll house.

Once the doll house was complete in July, I told her to start bringing me things.  I have to have everything priced so it takes me awhile to get through everything.   I had a lot of help from Binx with pricing.

As word got around that I was having a sale, more people gave me their stuff.  A colleague of mine was putting her house on the market so she was excited to bring me truckloads.  We ended up have 12 people representing their treasures at this sale.

My house was starting to look like a hoard.  It was time to set a date which took a lot of planning because I need Molly to be there with me to run the computer.  Her schedule wouldn't allow her to take a Friday off so we planned on Labor Day weekend, Saturday and Sunday.  I was a little worried about not having a Friday sale because that is usually a very successful day.

Our garage was even full of items.

I couldn't believe my friend wanted to sell Santa after she looked so hard to find him. I have a rule that once you give me something to sell, you can't have it back.  She regretted giving him to me and asked if I could make an exception.  I told her she could have Santa back so I had to take him to work with me to drop him off.   Imagine the looks I had when driving to work that morning!

The sale was VERY successful, even when we didn't have it on a Friday.  I wanted to take photos of the sale when it was set up but the first customers came at 7am when we started at 8am.  It took off from there and we were so busy, I didn't get any photos!  This was the first time I had to use the whole front yard as well as the driveway and garage.

Everyone is now talking about the spring sale they want me to host!

By the way, Mary helped a customer carry her bags to the car and the customer wanted her to have this!!!!

Little Guy

Today Molly sent me the following photos and said they were from 8 years ago.  This is when we saved Little Guy.

In 2014 we noticed there was a massive amount of squirrel nests in our front tree in Athens, Georgia.

One Saturday morning as we slept in with our windows open, we heard the most horrible little screaming noise outside our front window.  I looked out and saw three baby squirrels laying on the cement steps.  I knew this screaming would attract our cats so I ran out to save them.  One didn't make the fall, Binx got one of them, but there was one left.  The mom was no where in sight. We didn't know what to do with him.  We locked the cats in the house, I threw some bird seed near it thinking it could eat that.  We were hoping the mom would come get him but she never did. We  decided to put him in a big knot hole in a different tree.  It slept there peacefully for hours.

We heard the screaming again later that day.  Little Guy was out of the knot in the tree, clenching on and screaming for his mother.  It was really quite sad.  He didn't eat bird seed but Molly gave him avocado and he loved it! That kept him quite.

I had remembered a colleague of mine saying she once found baby squirrels and knew the woman who owned the flower shop rescued squirrels.  I called the rescuer right away and she told me to bring him over.  Once she met him she said he was a girl and couldn't take her because she was too big for the babies she was nursing back to health at the moment.  But she gave me all the supplies to take care of him.  She stocked me up with formula and a dropper to feed him with.  I was sad she couldn't take him but was determined to take care of him and get him back into the wild.  We had already named him Little Guy so he was still a he for us.

It was like having a baby again.  I would try not to wake him when it slept so I could get things done.  When he was awake, he needed my full attention.   We kept him in a homemade cage on the screened-in porch and watched as he grew bigger and bigger.  It was time to build him a house to put up in the woods in the back yard.  He LOVED it.  The top flipped open so I could check on him and also put clean bedding in.

When I would check on him, I would walk up to his house and call for him and he would stick his little head out and then run and jump on me.  He would be so excited. Probably about the nuts I always had.  One day when we were away from home for the day, I asked Molly to check on him.  It was dark so she took the flashlight with her.  She climbed the ladder, lifted the lid and he wasn't there.  She looked up in the tree with the flashlight and there was a possum right there staring at her!  She hurried down the ladder and came silently screaming home to tell us about her scary experience.  I was worried about Little Guy but he was back home the next morning with no possum in sight. 

I was always worried he wasn't getting enough water. So I made sure he did.

He would sit with me in the swing. I was really fond of him.

He was getting bigger and bigger and I didn't have to check on him as often.  It got to the point where I would go to his house and he wouldn't be there.  I would call for him and he would come running from many backyards away.  Sometimes he wouldn't come at all.  Finally, I was no longer needed and I imagined he found his mate and lived happily ever after.

Molly knew how much I missed him so she painted him on a rock.

My latest Doll House

I finished another doll house.   I went to my nephew's baby shower and asked if anyone has mentioned giving the baby a doll house yet.  They said no and would love to have me build one.  I had been wanting to try a Real Toys house from Hobby Lobby and had the perfect one in mind.  After seeing their new house and how it was decorated, my color ideas went out the window.  My nephew' wife suggested I try to make it look like theirs.  So I started building before the baby was born.  This kit is different from the vintage kits.  Mostly everything is precut and made out of MDF. It was like a great big puzzle.

Little did I know that this one would take me over a year to build.  I ran into a few mistakes that discouraged me and then I was displaced from my work space.  I work on these houses in the basement and when we decided to pull up all the carpet, my work table ended up in the corner with stuff piled on it.  We then decided to plan our basement bathroom before we put the new floor down so everything has been piled high for a long time. 

My first mistake was wallpapering the wrong walls.  You will see the paper doesn't face each other in the same room.  I later found out I wasn't supposed to put in the walls until the very end!  

I had to get out the steamer and steam the paper off.  I then had to run to the hobby store and buy more paper.  I was so worried they wouldn't have it because I had bought it months before.  What luck! They  had one piece left of each design.

I started working on the house upstairs since we have the downstairs torn up. I would store it in the bedroom when I wasn't working on it.

I would then haul everything to the kitchen when I was working on it.  There was a lot of painting involved.  

I hand stained each individual shingle.  This was very tedious.  I could have stained after they were glued onto the house but there was a warning that the shingles might curl up when staining.  I didn't want that to happen.  I decided not to stain all of them since it looked like there were more shingles than needed.

I was excited when the day came that I would start putting on the shingles.  This means I am almost done!

I ended up being around 10 shingles short. I had to get the stain back out and stain a few more.

The baby's 1st birthday was coming up so I really needed to step up and get this done and delivered before her big day.  I finished just in time!!

I delivered it one week before her 1st birthday!

Just in time.

Birthdays and Other Fun Things

We have recently celebrated some birthdays!  I had my second star birthday, born in 61 and turned 61. I had a nice time with Mike, Molly, and Adrien as we drank French champagne and ate Oreo ice cream cake!

I received very nice gifts, a print of the original Pete the Cat who Pete was named after and a Pete the Cat book, our Pete.

Later in the month, we celebrated Adrien's birthday by going to Cedar Ridge Distillery near Cedar Rapids.  

Kiki had a themed Birthday.  Kiki in Paris! Molly made a beret for Sammy but Binx had to try it on first.  

Sammy didn't keep it on  very long.

Kiki had a good birthday.

And the other fun things.......

We took Adrien to his very first baseball game.

Molly got to visit Maggie and Chase in Georgia.

Molly got to play with Maggie's cats.

They went to Mystic Falls which is not in Virginia but in Conyers, Georgia to visit where Vampire Diaries was filmed.

It was nice they could get together and hang out.  I wished I could have been there with them.