Frugal Shopping at the Estate Sales

Yesterday morning La Maya and I made a run on an estate sale in Troon, an upscale high-desert area of north north Scottsdale, where for $500,000 you get a stryofoam-and-stucco tract house nestled among the boulders in Commuter Hell. Houses in foreclosure out there go for upwards of four hundred grand.

It actually was a moving sale, and not a heckuva lot was left by the time the estate-sale organizer was hired—the real estate transaction closed yesterday, and the owner had moved almost everything out. But we found a few tschochkies.

The owner was given to buying crafty and ethnic items at galleries and upscale craft fairs. The sale offered a number of stoneware and art glass items that were kind of interesting. I snared three stoneware canisters, thinking they’d be nice on the kitchen counter, which right now is inhabited by an eclectic collection of various holders. I paid $15 for the three of them:

Once I got them home, I found the pea-green effect didn’t work at-tall in the kitchen. Casting about for someplace to put them, I realized the color would look just fine in the living room, whose walls are painted an Alexander Julian shade I think of as “swamp green.” I already had the pair of stacked square plates with the stone “fruits” on it. The canisters look like they were made to go with that arrangement. That little blue oval box also came from the moving sale.

It’s a little busier than I like. To pull this off, I got rid of the decorative gadget that has been sitting there for the past four years or so, a glass vase with a spray of twigs sticking out of it:

The glass vase actually  looked better than the stoneware things. However, I’ve been getting mighty tired of it, and besides, those damn twigs threaten to poke me in the eye every time I sit down on the sofa. I’ve wanted to get rid of it for awhile. The stoneware things may not last there, but I don’t think the glass and twigs will be coming back.