free by the side of the road

I have the absolute best best fried. Yesterday, she met us down by the river and chased after my youngest two while I sat and babied my knee. Even with my older two helping, there's no way I could've kept up with the toys that the little two kept deliberately floating downstream and still been able to walk back up to the car and drive home at the end of the day.

All four of the kids were so worn out that they actually went to bed at a decent hour and stayed there. Not that I got to enjoy it, because I fell asleep on the couch a couple of hours later while trying to watch a movie.

On the way home from the river, we passed a neighbor's house and I had to do an immediate U-turn to see if I'd really seen what I thought I saw.

It was. A vintage (I'm guessing 60s) kitchen set with a table and four chairs. And my eyes hadn't played a trick, it really was child size. Needed serious TLC, but you don't find things like that often, especially not with free signs on them.

I don't have time to refinish furniture. Even if I did, I don't have a need for or a place to put a wonderful little vintage kitchen set. But I do have a good friend who might.

Sadly, in the five minutes or so it took me to call her and her to get here, someone else snagged them. Next time I'm going to have the brains to call from my cell phone and leave my daughter sitting on them. (To add insult to injury, they only took the chairs. I'd asked if I could have just the chairs, but the neighbor didn't want to see the set broken up, which I totally agreed with. Apparently the next people to drive by didn't.)

I can't find anything like it online, but it was a similar style to this full size one.

What I did come home with was this -





At the time, I had no idea what it actually was, just that I wanted it for my old farmhouse and that since it had "Westinghouse" embossed on the front it probably had some kitchen purpose in its past. Turns out it's a cabinet stand for a 1950s Westinghouse roaster.

Never mind that I don't have a roaster to need a cabinet for, I'm going to clean it up and either use it for towels in the bathroom or cookbooks in the kitchen.

And I did not hide it. It was sitting right on the porch for Bill to see when he got home. There's an interesting post about Secret Dealings over on the Curious Quilter this afternoon. While my fabric dealings aren't exactly secret, I try not to draw too much attention to them.