{Estate Sale Temptations} All the Cookbooks in the World

This is going to be a very picture heavy post, but there's no other way to show you what made this sale so absolutely amazing. Estate sale season is in full swing and I'm trying really hard to be good. I only went to this place because I had to drive into town anyway for a different errand and I love time capsule kitchens and absolutely had to see these ovens...

I am so completely totally head over heels in love with this house. Before we  found the kitchen, we went through this room...

That looks like a lot of cookbooks, right? There were three more walls of them in that room, and more walls of books in the rest of the house. These people collected cookbooks and dolls. All of the dolls you can imagine. If the doll room at the needlepoint house had a couple hundred, this place probably had closer to a thousand. And a very pretty dollhouse.

I overhead someone say that there were ten bedrooms in the house. I'm sure I counted at least eight myself. And most of them were full of boxes and boxes of old plastic dolls. You just can't even begin to imagine. I had a three foot tall plastic doll when I was a little girl. This sale had at least twenty of them.

These were mostly vintage sheets...

Remember those old wallpaper murals?

I was madly in love with this little changing table. It's a perfect replica of the one my parents had when I was a baby, then passed down to us when our oldest was born...except sized for a little girl and her dolls.

The backyard was amazing. Those steps go down to a swimming pool style ladder that would go into the stream if it wasn't blocked by the fence. Just after I snapped this picture, a duck splashed down.

These windows look out over the yard and stream...and the neighbor's houses across the stream, but you can't have absolutely everything.

Around the side of the house is this.... Gazebo? Greenhouse? Top of a lighthouse? It was filled with vintage women's clothing, when I'm assuming was just in there for the sale but made a neat image.

I actually bought very little, even though the prices were great. There were plenty of temptations, but I limited myself to a handful of books, a really nice tablecloth, and two pillow cases. The one with the hospital logo was too quirky to leave behind. (And then I went back the day after I wrote this post and bought a ton of cookbooks for a dollar each.)

Teenage Son  had waited in the car because we were parked on a side street and he didn't think the neighborhood looked promising. I talked him into walking back because this was a house that shouldn't be missed (he agreed after seeing it.) On our second trip through, I noticed the indoor swimming pool that we'd missed seeing the first time.

How do you miss the room with the swimming pool? Especially since there was a window overlooking it from one of the other rooms. The house wasn't quite a maze but it went on and on  forever. I saw a couple of people get turned around and ask how to find the front door again.

This place definitely belongs on my list of favorite estate sale houses.