Tuesday, June 5, 2018

Summer Garage Sale Finds! Pay Yourself $$ Per Hour!!

I've been busy doing summer projects and working on some garage sale finds. I found this cast iron/wooden bench at a garage sale for $10.00. Exciting! 


 It needed a coat of paint and I found this older can of paint I had in the basement. It was barn red like the bench was originally. However, veering from my usual path of using whatever was available, I decided to buy some blue paint for this project. I also decided to repaint the cast iron because there was a little bit of rust in spots. Here is the can of paint I rejected and some free painting materials I got from Menards. The paint cost me about $17.00 for both the quart of blue and one spray can of brown metallic.


I found this cast iron stand at a garage sale for $2.00. I decided to paint it matching colors.

 
It was a pretty intensive project and took me a number of hours. I needed to put a few coats on the old, dry wood. The whole bench needed to be taken apart to paint it too.




 A $10.00 bench and a $2.00 stand and $17.00 worth of paint and some elbow grease and here is the end result! I am so pleased! 

I had some paint left over and during the drying times, I moved onto some other projects. I don't have a "before" photo of this but it is a plant stand and I paid $1.00 for it last year at a garage sale. It was gray and rusty.

Here is the end result, matching my bench and stand! 


I bought this fountain at a garage sale last week for $5.00. I thought for sure it wouldn't work but it does! It has a solar panel that makes it run. The woman said she paid $70.00 for it last year. I'm glad
 I took a risk!


I bought this bench at a garage sale a couple years ago for $10.00. It needed a fresh coat of paint now so I decided to paint it blue like the other one.



 Here it is in front of my garden. I love to sit on it between weeding rows!




I bought this glider at a garage sale a few years ago for $5.00. I am going to buy another can of spray paint and paint this brown to match the rest of the outdoor furniture.


Altogether I have a cast iron garden bench: $10.00. A cast iron stand: $2.00. A garden bench: $10.00. A plant stand: $1.00. A fountain: $5.00 and a glider: $5.00. Total $33.00. Add paint: $10.00 quart of blue. $7.00 spray paint and $7.00 for another can for the glider. Call it $25.00 with tax. $58.00 for all the outdoor garden furniture shown here plus quite a bit of elbow grease! I have about 8 hours in to painting and call it 8 hours of garage saling. If the items as they are listed above cost, say, $75.00, $25.00, $12.00, $70.00, $39.00 and $79.00 new, that is a total of $300.00. Granted, the items are not new, so, lets call it $200.00 altogether for the items. Working 18 hours on the project, I was paid $12.50 an hour (or $18.75 an hour if we called it $300.00). Pretty good pay!

Happy Savings! ~


2 comments:

  1. Wow!! They turned out awesome Lynne!! I love the color blue that you painted it too, so fun to have splashes of color in your garden!! And exciting to get so much more use out of used furniture! Love love that fountain too!! Now you've got me thinking about painting some worn garden furniture that I have!! Hugs :)

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