Finds At The Fair

I blame it on the mommy brain.

1. Remember our plans to go to the antique fair last weekend? 80km into our road trip I realized that I HAD THE WRONG WEEKEND. Oy.

2. Tara (you must visit her blog and see her lovely home!) had mentioned in the comments of my post that she frequents Southworks Antiques in Cambridge. Rather than turn around, we decided to keep driving and check it out. HandyMan, Chloe and I had visited Cambridge last summer after hearing about a great antique mall, but we couldn't find it. All we found was this outlet mall, filled with shoe stores, discount linen shops, and a place that sells socks and only socks. So we googled the place Tara mentioned (gotta love the iPhone) and ended up here: Yes, its the SAME PLACE we were at last summer. How we could miss the entrance and the 30,000 sq ft antique mall upstairs is beyond me!

But maybe things were supposed to turn out this way because we found a few little things, like these old yardsticks:

My plan is to stack them one atop the other and affix them to a wall somewhere, maybe in the new basement, and mark Chloe's height each year.

We also found this nice mail slot:

HandyMan will strip all the paint off of it, paint it black, and replace this ugly rusting thing:
I think this used to be the milk door, where fresh bottles of milk were dropped off. Its been boarded up on the outside and a mailslot added but on the inside, we still have a little door we open to access the mail. HandyMan will probably clean up the exterior while he's at it. Our poor mailman has suffered looking at this thing long enough.

Light It Up

We finally have some snow on the ground. Of course we should - its winter and I live in Canada - but this winter has been surprisingly light on snowflakes. One thing I love about this time of year is seeing all of the seasonal lights on the houses, twinkling and shimmering, giving off warm glows beneath puffy mounds of snow.

HandyMan recently came home with a new light for over the new front door. I'll admit I was skeptical; the vintage bubble type light we currently had seemed fine to me. But he was right. The new light really made our snowy facade look great! Have a look:

Exterior 2008:


Exterior 2009 - old light:


Exterior 2010 - new light:


While the old light gave more overall light and highlighted the door frame, I think this new light focuses on the door and makes it really pop. Plus, it's stainless steel and works well with the stainless steel house numbers and door hardware. We'll have to change the railing to stainless as well eventually, to make the exterior cohesive.



One of our neighbours even told us our house now stands out and looks straight out of a postcard and that's pretty great considering all the houses on our street look exactly the same. Goes to show you that sometimes, all you need is some flattering lighting to bring out your best features.