Prims By the Water

Wednesday, April 13, 2011

Michigan Pickers

We are antiquers by trade, drive a white van (not a Mercedes), scour the countryside for things that we can make a buck on...and love the thrill of the hunt, so I guess that makes us the Michigan Pickers. LOL.

Yesterday our day was just that. Woke up at 5:00am and drove an hour to get to the opening day of our local flea market in the next county over. Bought some things...got to a vendors truck as he was pulling in and bought things even before he could take them off of his truck. Ended up making another lady mad at us, because she wanted the items and was mad at the guy for selling them to us...we overheard her tell the vendor exactly that...can you believe some people. He even told her that we were there first. Oh yeah, this particular lady owns an antique store in the area, and unfortunately she has a bad reputation with most of the vendors at this flea market with being rude and trying to buy something that someone already had claimed. I guess it takes all kinds...but I am not like that, and I figure if you got there first, then so be it...but I'm not going to whine about it to the vendor for selling it to someone else.

Bob told the vendor that it must make him feel good knowing that his stuff sells before he even gets it off of his truck...I mean literally most of his items were sold before he took it off his truck. We even lost out on an item yesterday. We saw this cool primitive chimney cabinet, and it was already sold...we did not whine about it or tell the vendor we would give him a higher price if he sold it to us...we are just not like that... Oh well...enough of my soap box. Sorry about that. I get passionate about things sometimes.

Well got home around 10:00 in the morning from the flea market, and I decided to take a power nap. A half hour later Bob gets this call from a guy who wants to sell us some furniture. He only had until 1:30 and had to leave, so Bob told him another time. When Bob told me he told the guy another time...I said "what"...call him back or we may lose this opportunity. So Bob called him back up, and we drove another hour to this location...which ended up being a 5 story warehouse filled with FURNITURE...OMG

2 1/2 hours later, we filled our van with some cool furniture and even paid for two more pieces that we could not fit in...so we get to go back again!!! YIPEE. The owner Brian said we could come back anytime we want to because he has so much stuff and it is overwhelming him. His warehouse is a storage unit for the two major banks in town, where he moves furniture for them from foreclosed homes and he also takes excess stuff from estate sales. The place was a pickers GOLD MINE.

60,000 sq. ft. of STUFF

After we left the warehouse, we had to go to another appt., that we promised we would go to that day. We have been to this particular seller's home before and we made the appt. before we knew our van was going to be full, but we went anyways. Wouldn't you know it though, we ended up buying some small items from the couple and literally stuffed our van some more. We had items between us and I was carrying items in my lap all the way home...but it was worth it.

After we left, Bob was starting to get a headache because all he had all day was a banana to eat..I had eaten some cereal before we left. So we grabbed some fast food and ate while driving back to our store, which was another hour away.

We got back to the store after 5:00pm and by the time we unloaded our van, it was after 8:00 and we still had not eaten dinner, so we ate at one of the restaurants in town. I had smoked applewood grilled salmon with rice pilaf and veggies, and Bob had Eggplant Parmesan. Both were good...but I think at that point anything would have been good to us. We managed to get home just in time to watch the new season of the Deadliest Catch. I don't want to spoil it for anyone who may not have watched it yet, but it was a good one.

Tonight we are going back to the store to take pictures, so hopefully if it is not another late night, I will post some pics of some the goodies we were able to purchase....and even though I am extremely tired today, yesterday we truly did feel like the Michigan Pickers!!! LOL

1 comment:

Thank you friends for reading my blog! I especially enjoy reading your comments.