Some recent pickups: firewood stand, monkeys, flamingoes, and camper parts!

Hey everybody, Uncle Atom here.  I won't bore ya with everything I've found recently, but here are a few highlights:

I've been looking for something to store firewood in, and I recently found this hoop setup with hairpin-style legs at a local thrift store.  Not bad for $10!

On a day trip yesterday to Charm City (Baltimore ya know), we found a few things, including these great plastic monkeys for just $5.  I didn't notice until I got them home that they're each different - see no evil, hear no evil, and speak no evil.  They're perfect for the tiki screened porch!

From the same vintage shop, I also scored my third brass metal framed/lightup/3D picture.  A deer in the woods to go with fat Elvis and the Last Supper.  So it's official, with three I've got a collection. How hooked am I?  I actually paid $27 for this!  I know. You don't need to say it.  Lunatic! Still, if I average the three together, I've only got about $40 tied up.  And they're so Kitschy!

I'm really curious to know what other pictures came in these brass lightup frames.  Could there be one out there with a bullfighter?  Jesus?  Or maybe Marilyn Monroe?  Who knows, but if Uncle Atom spots one, rest assured you will read about it here.

UPDATE - ADDING  THE FORGOTTEN FLAMINGOES:
Across from where I got the monkeys and picture frame I found a local shop carrying new pairs of made in the USA flamingoes.  These guys will go along on camping adventures.

Here's one thing in Baltimore that I came very close to buying - an awesome Delmonico console stereo/record player/television set.  The store owner wanted $100.  We got both AM and FM stereo to play and they sounded pretty good after the tubes warmed up.  But the record player looked like it was missing parts, and it would not even spin.  I did not want to try the TV.  I'm not a fan of black laquer wood,and I'm not interested in fooling with vacuum tubes and electronics - I've got enough projects and I know my limits.  I want one of these that works!  But despite the things I didn't like, this was tempting because it looks so darn awesome.  I mean, I could just sit and look at this and keep smiling.

My big find this week was this mint/aqua stove/oven, exhaust hood, and sink taken from an old truck camper.  I found a 1964 date code under the sink, and the Shasta was built in 1962.  The colors really are nearly perfect for the Shasta!  I spent a good part of today installing the stove and hood.  It's so great to replace the ugly brown stove and hood, and the plain white sink.

  

Luckily the dimensions were very close to the original pieces. I did have to get out my tin snips and cut off about an inch or the back of the exhaust hood I have the countertop pulled and the old white sink out.  As soon as I can get some replacement formica I'll finish installing the sink.

So that's about it for now.  Did anyone else find some great stuff?

Light up tiki guy gets some new eyes

Withe the warm weather and a visit from friends this weekend, we got motivated and straightened up the tiki-themed screened porch.

Our flamingo planter got a fresh coat of hot pink paint.

Decorations were hung on the wall with great care (or willy nilly, you decide).

And we spent the day with some very special friends who are family to us.

I also dug out my supply of light bulbs and found some great clear red bulbs for the light up tiki guy.  Don't remember him?



It was a good day!

A few recent finds

Here are a few recent things I picked up:

I had this paper mache toucan that sits on a perch and hangs in our tiki-themed screen porch.

And at my last flea market visit, I found two more.

This last one has the mange - not sure how to preserve it or repair it, but the price was great, and they look good hanging from the ceiling beams.

I also picked up some more masks for the tiki porch wall, including this one.

And this carved head.

I had to feed my wrought iron habit when I spotted this wheeled cart for $9.99 in a Salvation Army store in Parkersburg, WV, last weekend.  It cleaned up pretty well, but I plan to prime it and give it another coat of semi gloss black, and lubricate the wheels a bit.

It's a good time of year to pick up vintage Christmas stuff, and when I saw this plastic Santa and reindeer for $8, I bought it.  A little more than I wanted to pay, but also lower than I've seen similar pieces elsewhere.

Now that I have a great record player, I'm looking through stacks of records wherever I go.  This one turned up in the Goodwill store in Parkersburg, WV, for a buck.  I'd love to have the vintage TV and the stand on the album cover.  Never heard of this TV program, but it works with my collection of records from old TV shows.  I can't imagine a TV show today featuring some guy playing tunes on an organ, can you?!

I've found a few old album covers featuring vintage chairs, so when I saw this, it came home with me too.

These teenagers look like they're having fun.  This was probably pre-American Bandstand.

There are several of these Jonah Jones Quartet albums I've picked up recently, and the same two blondes show up on at least three of them.

I'll end with this great Rock Ola juke box I spotted in an antique store in downtown Parkersburg, WV.  It's a real beaut, but at $975, it didn't follow me home.  I have never seen a cheap jukebox, have you?

Room Profile: more on the Tiki-themed screened porch

OK, before I wire up one of the 3-tiered wall lamps, here are some more pics of our screened porch.

This shows the porch from the outside. Duh. The roof is made of sloped tongue-and groove redwood, and the roof extends past the screened porch to form the roof for the carport.

Tbe room has some design challenges.  First, it has four, yes four, doors.  Two screen doors, and two dutch doors.

I have no idea why anyone installed these dutch doors side by side.  The one on the right leads into the kitchen, and the one on the left leads into the dining room off the kitchen.  A wall divides the kitchen and dining room, but there's a doorway between them.  Makes no sense to have both dutch doors, but we do like them.

Second, we have a couple of blue plastic recycling bins we keep on the porch.  It's very convenient to have right off the kitchen, but I really need to make some kind of screen to hide them from sight.

We have some vintage wrought iron and caned chairs and tables that we picked up years ago in an antique mall about 240 miles from home.  We loved them and decided we could squeeze them into our small station wagon.  It was a cramped trip, but worth it.  Three of the chairs can be moved together to form a sofa, or used separately.

It wasn't hard to clean and paint the wrought iron legs on these pieces.  I added a little shellac and they look almost new.  One chair had some caning coming loose on an arm, but a local antique store I found does re-caning, so for a reasonable price I got the chair fixed.

Yes, that's a cat-shaped bird cage.  And a vintage TV tray.

I need to clean these up some.

Right now, my light-up fu man chu tiki guy lurks on top of a rusty old milk box.

Last summer we added a couple of caned bar stools I saved from the trash one morning on my way to work.  The stools only need a little clean up and paint on the legs.  And since I had shellac left over from doing the interior walls of the Shasta camper, I just brushed a fresh coat of shellac onto the stools. 

The red formica bar top is attached to the ledge along one wall of the porch.  The bar top was a countertop out of a neighbor's kitchen.  I saved it from the trash and used my table saw to cut about 4 inches off the back of the counter to narrow it enough to try as a bar top.  Works pretty good for free.

Vintage paper mache toucan from my favorite flea market.

This pink wrought iron flamingo planter is hard to photograph well.  Not vintage, but fun, and it fits the room.

The porch had two wooden screen doors, which I replaced with these salvaged mill-finish aluminum screen doors.  Here's screen door number one.  Still period correct, and they automatically latch so they're better for keeping our frisky corgi Lucy from escaping.

Screen door number two, directly across from screen door number one.  Number two leads down a couple steps to the back of the carport and to a stairwell down to the back yard.

One of a couple of primitive masks I picked up pretty cheap at a yard/estate sale near my favorite flea market.

Small primitive mask and the string of tiki lights we have running around three walls of the screened porch.  The blinds are cheap Home Depot plastic, but they give us a little privacy and look OK.

I should add that the screen mesh around the whole porch is original, along with the white wood trim that is nailed over the screen edges.  It's all going to get replaced because the wood is rotting in spots, it's been painted too many times to look good with another repaint, and the screen mesh has some holes in it.  So, one of my summer goals is to tear off the old and replace the screen mesh with a darker tinted mesh and install all new wood trim around the outside edges.

I still may close this space in some day with windows to make it a three-seasons room. I'd love to keep it looking original, and to do that I hope to run across a bunch of old jalousie-style windows.  (They're the kind that have a crank and typically a lot of 3-inch wide horizontal glass panes that open when you turn the crank).

So, there you have it, the tiki-themed screened porch.  It's still a work in progress.  Believe it or not, we used to have a hammock frame and hammock on the porch, but it just didn't quite fit.  Sure was comfortable though.  Now instead we have my daughter's bamboo papasan chair.  No pics of that at the moment.

I plan to install one of the 3-tirerd wall lamps this weekend and do a post comparing it to my brassy plastic disco wall lamps from the previous post.  Stay tuned.