Tuesday, October 27, 2009

Do You Know Where You Are???

If your first thought was "You're in the Jungle, Baby!" then mark your calendar for the debut of the South Shore's most Rockin' Guns & Roses Tribute Band, "Dust & Bones", appearing Halloween Night at Basta's in Weymouth. For those of you wondering What Is She Talking About and Why is She Spamming us Blog Fans with an ad for a Headbanger's Ball??? I'll let you in on a little secret. Most of you know me as Salvage Chick, but I'm also... Mrs. Axl Rose. I know, I might as well invite the Paparazzi over for Thanksgiving Dinner, it's bad enough they found out where Salvage Chick lives when I had that yard sale, now I've disclosed that when Kenny sheds his IP-telephony Troubleshooting Clark Kent persona, he is a Rock & Roll Superhero! Axl will be appearing around 9:30 on Saturday at Basta's... the dog & the rice cooker are staying at home.


Oh and for all you ladies with their sights set on Axl, HANDS OFF! He's mine. And I'll be sporting fake tattoo sleeves so I'll be extra tough that night. Hope to see you there! The band is REALLY good and I'm not just saying that because I'm so relieved they're finally not playing in my basement anymore.

Sunday, October 18, 2009

Greetings from the North Pole

Just a note to all you Vintage Christmas Fans, our Holiday Open House is just FOUR weekends away and the Sweatshop, I mean Back Room, is already in full swing with preparations!! Claudia and I have our glue guns unholstered and are already churning out the famous Salvage Chic Christmas Wreaths. Today's torrential downpour made me wish I was home baking so I whipped up this little something with just the Ingredients I had on hand. Jam-packed with vintage kitchen tools & cookie cutters, plus old recipes putting it just over-the-top with Baking Whimsy, This would be the Perfect Gift for the Baker on your List! (Photos never do these babies justice, you must come to the Open House to see for yourself!)


And now a few glimpses of what else we've already unearthed. If these photos excite you... you should see what ELSE we'll be hauling out of storage!! See you at the Open House, Nov 14 & 15 from 10AM-5PM.





Wednesday, October 14, 2009

Grossed Out

File this under SERIOUSLY?!?

I received this email from a kind Craigslist Shopper recently: "Youre stuff is gross and not very nice looking why would you resell that. And please stop the overposts, one link to your website is enough. We want to see private sellers not you."

Um, OK. So I sat here sitting on my hands for a few minutes trying not to type a 2-word response ending in YOU! or OFF! Or retaliating simply "Get a Life." I wondered if this poor soul would appreciate a lesson in the difference between YOUR and YOURE, and that usage of the latter does require an apostrophe. Also, Interrogative sentences generally end with a question mark.

Then of course, I remembered I AM running a business here and while the Blog Fans might appreciate my snarky yet cute sentiments, this person would not. SIGH. I couldn't just ignore them, so after much careful thought replied: "If it’s not your taste, it’s not your taste; no need to be insulting. In the future when you search furniture and the page opens up and you see search for: and in: there’s a drop down box to the right of in: where you can select Furniture By Owner so you don’t see ads from any dealers."

Wasn't that Professional of me? Meanwhile, I'm just glad so many of you share my same Gross Style of Decorating. In fact, I'm off to gross up some more merchandise right now!

Thursday, October 8, 2009

The Hunt For Mr. October

Red Sox Playoff Season is upon us and its arrival brings to mind thoughts of Mr. October. No I'm not talking about Reggie Jackson, I'm talking about the Husband who is suddenly miraculously able to stay up until all hours of the night watching West Coast Playoff Games. Sure enough, Mr. October himself sent me an Instant Message this morning, requesting I stock up on some of his favorite beer. Hmph, I thought; Whatever Happened to Kenny "I'm just not myself if I don't get my 8 hours" Pearl? June Cleaver that I am, happily obliged him with a trip to the Packie... but not before I had cooked up an Evil Scheme to go along with tonight's Enchiladas.



I'm really not a Nagging Wife (we do all recognize Kenny is out making an actual living here, thereby allowing me to frolic in the playground known as Salvage Chic, right?) so I try not to give him 20,000 things to do around the house on his downtime. But I did have one item on the 'Kenny-do' list that frankly, I was sick of looking at.



He caught me by surprise coming home a bit early from his Rhode Island office tonight but luckily I had already begun preparations for my little skit. He was bee-lining for the powder room after his long commute when something in the living room caught his eye and stopped him dead in his tracks.



The word CRESTFALLEN can only describe the look on his face when he saw that his beloved TV had been cordoned off like a crime scene. Then his jaw dropped even further as he read the accompanying note: "OUT OF ORDER UNTIL BATHROOM TOWEL ROD IS HUNG."



About an hour later Kenny had just finished scarfing up his beloved Enchiladas (did I mention I HATE Mexican food?) when he asked if I wanted to go hang out in the Living Room. I casually reminded him that the TV was 'Broken' and just as I was wondering if he was going to remember that there are other televisions in the house he could watch the game on, he suddenly got busy!! Neither snow, sleet, dead of night nor a dead drill battery could deter him from getting this done.



I do believe I heard a few utterances of "The THINGS Someone will do for Blog Material..." in between curses coming from behind the bathroom door but soon enough he emerged victoriously to reveal, my New Towel Rod! (Or actually, my Chippy Vintage Towel Rod, you knew I wouldn't buy a new one, right?)



He had to hang it way up high because the bathroom is so narrow (remember the previous post about the 'Charm' of Antique Homes? Knees practically hitting the wall while using the toilet is one of them...)



Now I can only pray that the Red Sox actually win tonight... THANKS KENNY!!
And since I cleaned the bathroom today while I was playing Happy Housewife, I'll leave you with a few more glimpses of my own 'Powder Room Antiques":

I can't resist any Vintage Dog thing so this old sketch of dogs peeing on the wall was a Definite Keeper. (Note: If you are going to decorate with Vintage Toiletries, alert all family members that they probably shouldn't USE them... we had one small Baby Powder that Burns Incident.)



Continuing the Dog/Pee theme, imagine my delight when I stumbled upon an old Avon Perfume bottle shaped like a hydrant!



My mom stitched together this little skirt for me so I could Velcro it to the underside of the sink, hiding the pipes and providing storage for cleaning products, extra toilet paper etc.



And last but not least, this is from that Catalog Barn. Having 2 rolls is really handy so you never run out; and No, I don't read Real Simple in the bathroom... it just looks cooler than whatever geeky video game magazine Someone Else reads, that is hiding behind it!

Wednesday, October 7, 2009

Technical Difficulties

As we're all now painfully aware of, the Salvage Chic website was down for a few days this week. I first noticed it on Saturday night when I went online and got this giant "FORBIDDEN" message on my screen. My initial thought was "Ha Ha Kenny, very funny" as I figured he was playing a prank on me and blocking my laptop from going on the Internet. He had No Idea what I was talking about though so my next call was to the Hosting Company, Superpages. Where I found my account had been 'locked' due to an outstanding balance and they cheerfully informed me I could speak to the Billing Department on Monday at 8AM.

I spent the better part of Sunday fretting about what people were going to think when they logged on and saw THIS:

YOU ARE NOT AUTHORIZED TO VIEW THIS PAGE

Like, poor Jerry in Natick! His partner Wally is always playfully threatening to restrict him from my website... this could be a Relationship Breaker! And all my customers in the Corporate World, who will think that their employers wised up to the fact that they are wasting precious hours browsing my website on company time, when they should really be processing insurance claims or writing medical software code. One woman even emailed me to say she was going through withdrawal, she needed her daily Fix or the D.T.s were about to set in!!

So Monday rolled around and I hooked up with Nancy in Billing and we determined that the debit card that automatically paid the bill every month had expired hence the lock on the account. Only it wasn't a 'lock', they had actually DELETED the whole website. Seriously, it was like my whole existence over there had just evaporated. And this was only one month's payment missed, without even a phone call to see if maybe I wanted to provide them with a new form of payment before they annihilated my website. Nancy cheerfully forced me to sign a brand new contract and said there was a chance they could recover the data, as long as 72 hours hadn't transpired since they deleted it. We were now past the 48 hour mark.

I spent about 6 hours on the phone with Nancy on Monday, who had engaged the support of Technical Guy Jody, and they were very good about keeping me busy with Up-To-The-Minute Reports, such as "we are just waiting for Amber to get back from lunch to figure out why the Billing system is not synching with the Technical system so Jody can have the green light to try to restore your data." TICK-TOCK...

Finally around 4PM the website was (sort of) back online so I went off to an Auction with Claudia to try to forget about the whole sordid mess. Only to come home and find out it WASN'T entirely back online... SIGH. If you're still having problems accessing it a quick re-boot of your Router should do the trick, as it's probably cached the address of the old server that no longer has the data on it.

Now the kicker of it all is I had told Nancy "I have the $14.95 a month package" which she kindly set me back up with... but in the interim a rate hike took place so now I have less data storage & transfer bandwidth than I had, and I now have to upgrade to the $24.95 package to get back what I had. Hmmm, I wonder how many people they kicked off for being 1 day past due, in order to force them to sign a new contract at the higher rate. I smell a call to the Better Business Bureau in my future!

Word to the Wise: If you need a Website Host, don't go to Superpages; or as I know affectionately refer to them: SUCKYpages.

Monday, October 5, 2009

Yardsale Aftermath

So we had the Grand Yardsale Last Weekend and in case you couldn't tell from the lack of Blogging, it took me about a week to recover. I wish I didn't wait so long because it's not quite so fresh in my mind now but the day began at 7AM with me, Kenny and my mom Kath hauling everything out of the sheds. It took almost 2 hours to get everything loaded on & around the tables & furniture we had lined the driveway with the night before, which put us just in time for the scheduled start of 9AM. With fresh ones and quarters in our pockets Kath and I were eager to start selling, while Kenny went off to take a nap. (Seriously!)

Some of the more memorable highlights:

A guy tried to buy this crock that has my name & address on it. TWICE. I tried to explain to him that it wasn't old, I'm pretty sure my in-laws ordered it from L.L. Bean or something, and plus, it had my NAME and ADDRESS on it. I can only hope that he had poor vision and thought it was some valuable old piece of stoneware, and not that he is a psycho stalker.


People actually respected the start time and other than the Creepy Crock Buyer were refreshingly honest. I would not expect people uncovering what they think are Hidden Gems at a yard sale to bring them to the Seller and disclose their True Value. "Um, excuse me, I just wanted to point out that this is a piece of Fenton Milk Glass" I know it is, but Thanks... "and this is worth about 25-35 dollars" (in 1987... Out Loud I replied Then you are getting a GREAT DEAL for just 2 bucks!!) Sadly, he already had that piece in his collection and placed it back on the table.


Another Good Samaritan sidled up and told me that the glass insulators I was selling for $1 each could be worth $80-$90 each (THEN BUY THEM!!!) Sadly he too left them on the table. There actually are some insulators in rare colors or shapes that are worth several hundred dollars but these were run-of-the-mill and just make a nice paperweight or if you are really ambitious, you could turn it into a candle sconce like this:


All in all it was a really busy day but much like rabbits all that junk on the tables seemed to multiply so at 3PM we started saying everything half off which made a lot of it go away and then at 5 everything was FREE except for a few select items of furniture. I started trying to keep too much but then told myself to BE STRONG - it was time to clean the slate and seriously, I will have no problem finding more Vintage Thermoses.

And here we have it... the Aftermath! Or rather... the AFTER Photos of the shed. I knew I had some organization under all that mess! Oh, and the MATH turned out pretty good too... time to start filling the place up again!!