Welcome to this week’s round of Saturday Steals. To participate, find your own steal, write a post on it including a link back to this event at Archives of Our Lives (and the above image, if you so desire), and add the link to the list at the bottom of this post.

Last week when my sister was here, we dedicated Saturday morning to yard sale sailing, one of our favourite pastimes.

I fancy yard sales in Southern Alberta because there is such a huge population of old farts here. While this makes for annoying waits in line at the pharmacy and really maddening traffic, I cannot deny that it also makes for excellent yard sales. Vintage kitchenware, books, furniture, you name it—my never-ending supply of geriatrics has got it.

Well, last Saturday was no exception. Anonymous My Sister and I stumbled across jackpot of all jackpots: A RETIREMENT NEIGHBORHOOD MULTI-HOUSE (14, to be exact) YARD SALE EXTRAVAGANZA.

I had $10 cash (or was it $20?) that I limited myself to that day, and I’ll be darned if I didn’t come home with George Jettson’s trunk choc full of treasures.

My favourite find was this bird cage…

…for $2.00.

I almost didn’t buy it, can you believe it? I can be so dense sometimes. Thankfully, I had Anonymous My Sister there to slap some sense into me.

It needs a coat of paint that is not poop brown, and it’ll be good to go.

Where will I put it, you ask?

Why, in my newly decorated home office, of course!

(Enter Part II of this week’s Saturday Steal.)

Poor Kyle bought a house before we ever got engaged. It is a fine house, with ample room for our needs (especially since we don’t have any children to hog the three spare bedrooms with their diaper genies and chew toys).

But the office has always pulled double duty in the house, serving not ONLY as the office but also as a domestic cesspool for unanswered mail, stray bobby pins, dinosaur computers, blood pressure monitors (don’t ask), and sundry homeless crap.

I bet you didn’t believe me. That’ll teach ya.

Anyway, now that I have decided I am going to be a brooding writer when I grow up, I decided I needed a legitimate, specified space for just such brooding. (Oh, fine, and maybe a bit of writing, too.)

This office is getting a makeover, stat.

Starting with moving all that junk to a different spare bedroom to organise later. (There are enough rooms in our house for a good ten years of crap relocation before I ever actually have to deal with any of it. I’m so lucky that way.)

Except it has to be on a shoestring, because of that part where I’m not yet a brooding writer (leastwise, not one that gets paid anything remotely resembling MONEY).

So I decided that I can’t stand the carpet, but instead of buying cork tile for my lair, which is what my dream office will have, I settled on painting the sub-floor a cool, crisp white.

And here’s where the steal comes in: today, as I began the task of ripping up the carpet (secretly crossing my fingers that there would actually be 100% dark walnut floors underneath the stinky berber mess), imagine my joy (well, half-joy, really) when I discovered PRE-PAINTED SUBFLOORS!

It’s everything I ever wanted in a floor (except cork), and I couldn’t be happier (unless I was). Still, it will save me an extra coat of paint for the priming process, and I am not one to look a gift horse in the eye.

Or is it mouth?

Whatever, it’s a steal.

**********************************

Now it’s your turn! Add your own steals link to the list below:

Share this post: on Twitter on Facebook on Google+