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!