Happy Halloween!

I’ve been visiting the local brocante (sort of a cross between an op-shop and a antique shop) a lot over the past few weeks and have become best buddies with the owner.  Mainly because every time we go there, we end up buying something for the house – so far a wardrobe, a bookcase, stacks of stuff for the kitchen, and the most awesome vintage poster– so he is making a tidy trade from our newly acquired home-owner status.

His shop is madness.  Half of the stock is outside, which means every time it rains, everything gets waterlogged.  Inside it is beyond belief.  You have to gingerly pick your way between towers of old chairs, bedside tables stacked to the ceiling and piles of old picture frames, to get to anything you want to see.  Even then, half of the objects are so hidden behind the mountains of gear that it is pretty impossible to really see anything at all.  But with the chaos comes that exciting spark of hope that maybe, just maybe, the very thing you are looking for is there, buried amongst the other random junk.

The other day I mentioned that we were looking for a big table for the dining room.  Something sturdy and preferably a bit rustic.  2-3 metres long?

He told me that on top of what he had in his current shop – which is enormous – he had another warehouse out in the country where he keeps some of the bigger items.  He told us he had a few tables and invited us to come and check them out that evening after he shut up shop.

We met at the shop and followed him in our car.  He sped off like a lunatic and we really struggled to keep up as he tore down old country roads.  Finally we arrived at his shed – in the middle of a paddock of sheep.

It was huge!  So big, that an old caravan he had inside was dwarfed.  And there was so much shit.  So much.  And in more of a jumbled state than his town shop, which by comparison felt like Ikea.

Here are some pics to give you an idea.

Anyway, after about half an hour of wending our way through towers of furniture and picking through the bits and pieces, we unfortunately couldn’t find anything we liked or needed – and we felt bad about it because we had the feeling we were ‘special guests’ in his hall of bedlam.  He wasn’t put off at all however, and even gave us two umbrellas as parting gift because it had started to rain (one of them was completely broken, but it was a nice thought).

I did find something pretty cool in his shop the other day though – this book. 

...les bébés de vampire...

'Hurry up and eat your soup before it coagulates'

'a visit to granny'

We had the same book in English in our town library when I was growing up and it was one of my favourites.

A pretty good Halloween find!