The Barn Sale

Well, the Barn Sale is over and it was a massive success, despite more than two inches of rain that fell on the first day! All of Friday, we’d spent doing the final preparations of the barn, making sure everything was tagged and styling the furnishings to make them look fabulous.

If you look at the header picture and then at this one above, you will see that we’ve added a ton of pea gravel, some cool lounge chairs, some urns, a table and a great glass ball. The rest of the patio has more chairs, lanterns and some wire plant holders. Most everything in these pictures was gone by the end of day one!

As I said, it was chucking down rain all of Saturday, but the crowds still came. We had everyone line up to wait for the opening, and they had their Wellie boots and big umbrellas.

When we finally let people into the barn, at 9:00 a.m. on the dot, people sprinted to get first dibs!

We knew it was going to rain, but no one had any inkling that it would rain so much and so hard. But even so, everyone was cheerful and patient.

Prices ranged from thousands of dollars to one dollar and people bought at every range.

When things finally wound down on Saturday afternoon, we realized that we’d sold most of the big pieces of furniture, including a gorgeous antique Baltimore table for the tidy sum of $9,000. So much for the person who complained that we only had “old stuff”. We estimated that we’d probably sold 2/3 of what was in the barn at the end of the first day.

After everyone left, we shifted a lot of things around so the barn wouldn’t look so empty and made the space look fresh again!Luckily, overnight, a big front blew all of the rain out and the crisp sunny air in!

We had decided that at noon, almost everything would be half price and that’s when the crowds came! Things were flying out of the barn! We roped Jonathan in to ferry people and their items up to the upper field – the lower one had turned into a mud bath after the rains – and it was such fun to see the Gator filled with fabrics, pillows and china!

After having been at the barn setting up the sale for weeks and weeks, I finally got around to doing some shopping at the end of the second day, when more than 3/4 of everything was GONE! I picked out some fabrics, including a fabulous Brunschwig & Fils deep chocolate brown zebra print on linen!

I found a beautiful blue and white serving dish that has so much detail to it. This is the handle, although that’s hard to tell.

Here’s the mark on the reverse, and that’s even detailed, too!

I love old linens, especially when they’re actually LINEN, and picked up two beautifully monogrammed top-sheets which I am going to make into a duvet cover. I am sure that somewhere in my family tree, there’s someone with these initials!

Here are some more of the fabrics I picked up.

It was a fun weekend, and we thank everyone who volunteered and attended the sale! Thanks for taking the time to introduce yourselves to me. I really loved meeting you.

 

When people asked us when the next sale was going to happen, we cheerfully told them NEVER EVER AGAIN!

Busy, Busy Bee!

The next four days are going to be crazy. Fun, but crazy! I am coordinating a big lecture at work, and have been pulling all of the loose ends together. In addition, I’ve been transcribing a book that was written in the 1930’s, but never published. We are going to be publishing it, and are really excited.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

I segue right from the lecture into the final preparations for our Barn Sale. We have tagged more than 2000 items and have everything from chandeliers to barn buckets. Prices range from $1.00 to $8,000. But there’s every price in between!

For more detailed information, please check the Facebook page for the Barn Sale. HERE. If you do come, please say hi!

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

My name is Meg and I am an addict. I might have a slight addiction to this fabulous mother-of-pearl silverware. I bought a couple of lots of it a few weeks ago, and when more came up for auction this week, I bought some of that, too. This was the first time I’ve seen spoons, since many early sets did not have spoons!

I have sold almost everything I’ve put on my Etsy shop and I just added a few more pieces this evening. I am having a lot of fun photographing the pieces, using different pieces of china. You can see some of the first sets here.

The details on these pieces are exquisite and I am having such fun checking and polishing each and every piece. Look for them on the Etsy shop sometime next week. I won’t be posting anything until then as I will be consumed by the barn sale!

Concours d’Elegance

Each year, the Baltimore Architecture Foundation hosts a golf tournament, cocktail party and car show. Each year, friends and golfers bring their most amazing cars to show off. It’s getting to the point that we have people who only come to the cocktails and car show, because they know that the cars are going to be spectacular. As they were again this year.

This was my absolute favourite. It’s a friend’s 1956 Jaguar. It is simply stunning!

Months and months ago, I created the save the date postcard for the Golf Tournament, and photoshopped the chairman of the event into an old woody station wagon.

And then this happened! And no, it’s not the same car!

This was the cutest car. Someone said that you just wanted to hug it. It’s a 1940 Bantam.

This is a 1930’s era Pierce Arrow. The colour on this car has so much depth.

From the same collector, a 1930’s Packard. These cars are impeccable.

I did rather like this one – a four-door black Maserati. Very swish!

A line of primary coloured cars including a Citroen, a Fiat, the little Bantam and a Triumph.

Of course, I wouldn’t say no to this Aston Martin!

And for fun, an old Army Jeep… except it’s a Ford.

Which do you like best?

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

On a totally different note, a huge storm blew through earlier this evening, leaving us with the most amazing sky!

They’re called Mammatus clouds and are generally a sign of unstable weather. A huge storm had just passed and the temperature dropped about 30* in two hours. These clouds were seen as far north as Philadelphia, about 100 miles from Baltimore. There were loads of images of them both on Facebook and Instagram after the storm. I wrote about them a few years ago, here.

I’ll Take This: English-Style Cottage

This has always been one of my favourite houses in Baltimore. It’s about 10 minutes away from my house now, and sometimes I detour and drive by just to admire it.

It is such a quirky house with porches and gardens. It’s sited on an island with the road completely surrounding it, so the only neighbours are across the street. It’s at the bottom of a huge hill and the whole area is lovely and shaded by massive trees.

One of the things I’ve loved most about this house is the old-fashioned sleeping porch, which you can in the first image. These porches date from the days before air-conditioning, central or otherwise. This looks like a camp in the Adirondacks, but it’s really in Baltimore City. I can just imaging the breezes blowing down the hills and cooling the sleeper.

Another thing I love about the house is the variety of windows. There are some with leaded glass, others that are double hung and still more that open out to the gardens.

The gardens at this house are extensive and of the rough-and-tumble variety, rather than the over-manicured type.

The interiors are interesting, and it looks like a family of well-travelled artists is in residence.

I am still trying to figure out what the ladder is for. Any suggestions?

There are interesting pieces throughout the house, like this one in a niche across from the stairs,

and this one in the kitchen, which looks like the torso of a pregnant woman.

It looks like they kept the original pantry cabinetry, which thrills me!

The house has six bedrooms, and 4.5 baths. It’s got a secret garden with a fish pond, and over an acre and a half of land. Click here for details.