Thrift Score: Danish Modern Chairs,
Classroom Maps

Omigodyouguys.

Four Danish modern dining chairs at the Unique on Sheridan last week for $9.99 apiece.  (One and a half pictured.)

Then, last night: four vintage school classroom maps, two of the world, two of the United States, with hardware, at the Village Discount Outlet on Lawrence.  For those of you who have been to the Albany Park VDO you know it’s like, the worst thrift store in the city. Jumbled mess, smelly, broken merchandise.  But it’s 4 blocks from my house and can be on my way home from work if I make it so, and so I go there a few times a week.

The second rule of thrfiting: thrift often!

So — four vintage classroom maps coming to the Etsy store soon.

(Cat currently inspecting.)

Thrift Score: Trunk Full o’ Metal

You know you’ve breached the boundary between hobby and obsession when, on a random Monday night, you go from normal citizen to scrap metal truck driver.

This is a photo of Jem (who, up until the split second before this picture was taken was grumbling) helping me unload a truck full of metal furniture and industrial items I sniffed out from a few Craigslist listings.  A West Loop manufacturer was going out of business and selling the building, liquidating 60+ years’ worth of office furniture.  So I left work a little early, got the only truck in the I-Go fleet, and headed down there to take a look.

This is some of what we ended up with:

(This room is supposed to be our guest bedroom.  Ha!)

Not only did I get to pick up the things I’d seen on Craigslist and asked to buy specifically, the business owner let me walk around the building picking out other items I was interested in.  It was like my own private industrial estate sale!

My favorite pick: this antique time card holder.

Consider this your sneak peak of a few items that will be appearing on Etsy next week…

Thrift Score: 13 Lamps!

I’m building a lampire!  Muah haha ha ha ha ha.

Sorry no Craigslist Roundup this afternoon.  I have a bit of a project I’m working on: cleaning up and testing all of these lamps I scored this weekend.

My sincerest thanks to Baz, who tipped his Twitter followers off to a cache of lamps about to be drastically undersold on eBay — and a super big thanks to Baz for actually picking them up in Crown Point, Indiana this weekend and delivering them to me.  (Note to readers: BackGarage is considerably less full service.  You can learn about awesome bargains here, but I probably won’t deliver them to your doorstep.)

Anyway, in addition to the 10 lamps I nabbed on eBay Friday morning, I scored some additional hot interior lighting at some estate sales this weekend: these two green lamps and the smoky lucite orb with the regency sparkle interior, up top.  Total paid for this massive stash?  Under $50.

So no Roundup this weekend, but I do have a hot tip for you:

Craiglook.com

That way you can search multiple cities at once.

Thrift Score: Vintage Olive Telephone

Finally!  A phone of my own.  We have a home phone line but never use it, especially as we haven’t had an actual phone since moving in.  (We gave our old, ugly cheap Target phone away.)  This is a heavy duty phone with a heavy duty ring — and to my liking, push-button dialing so I can do things like operate doorbell buzzers should I need to, and press “0″ 26 times when I get frustrated with machine prompts and want to speak to the operator.

Just $9 at the Unique Thrift on Sheridan.