Vintage Surprises

We knew that the trailer part of our beach shack was old, but we were surprised to find out just how old.  When we went to settlement, we received a copy of the "title" from the DMV and learned that it's a 1952 Ventura. Sixty years old.... which means that we probably shouldn't have been surprised when we ran into a lot of issues in remodeling the kitchen.

Right now, poor Doug is in the middle of a big plumbing mess:

And every time we work on the place, we tear away more of the old crap in the kitchen, including rotted wood, old electrical wires, and filthy insulation.

So, since it may be awhile before I have any startlingly wonderful before and after pix of an entire room to post, I thought I'd share a few of the fun things we found on our vacation that will eventually show up in our remodeled kitchen.

One afternoon, we stopped at Blackwater Trading Company, an antique shop outside Cambridge, Md., which had a lot of great stuff at really great prices.

We found these cool vintage canisters, which are in really nice shape, for $15:

And this cute sifter for $4:

We chatted with the owners, who were really friendly, and mentioned that we had passed their store several times but always found it closed.  They told us they lived in the house that's attached to the store, gave us their business card, and said to just call if we came by again and wanted something else.

The next day, Doug said to me, "You know we really should have bought that blue chicken dish at Blackwater." So we called the owners, and they graciously agreed to meet us the following afternoon so we could make our purchase:

We spent a delightful half hour with them and learned that they buy out entire houses to stock their shop. We got on the email list for their giant spring yard sale and told them about our beach shack project.

We were really glad we had gone back because we felt like we had made new friends.

And besides, every Delaware beach shack needs a blue chicken, since our state bird is the fighting blue hen: