Mary, the name on the fruit plates & mugs is "Fruit De Jour" by Shafford. They had more, but I hesitate to offer to buy them & ship them to anyone here as I know how things get broken in the mail. They were cheap enough & I would not hesitate to help out anyone here, but anything breakable is a huge risk in the mails! You should have seen what the airline did to our luggage! We watched them throw it right in front of us at the airport. Everything liquid now has to go in the checked baggage & we had tops of shampoos & lotions cracked off & all over our clothes, and the mail service is no better. Ladies, you all need to come to go to yard sales with me, I'm buying way too much, I now have two shelving units full in my basement & can't see where I can steal anymore room for more things! UGH!!! Hubby has offered to put up more shelves & I said no, but after all this summer shopping I may have to take him up on it! LOL And, here comes another weekend of sales right around the corner!LOL

With pleasure, nanny----they were purchased online from Grandinroad, the less expensive arm of Frontgate. They were very reasonable, well made, and (surprisingly) actual leather. For the price I was expecting pleather :-) I have linked to them below. Here is a link that might be useful: Grandinroad ottomans

Most of my house is garage sale/thrift store or side of the road finds. We also love antique malls but I'm fussy about the prices I will pay there. I have not been to a yard sale this year (OK, ONE. I went to ONE, a friends). I'm in withdrawl I think. Perhaps it's because a year ago hubby hit the motherload with a yard sale around the corner. For $100 he bought a box of our "good" dishware, a bucket chair that needs recovering but it's so cool, two bertoia chairs which are mesh chairs from the 50's (they were broken but BIL is welding them for us), a large box of vintage planters, dishes for a friends set that made a lovely Christmas present...and then when some things didn't sell the guy came down and just gave them to us (a few vases, some clothing for hubby...). Now I know a bunch of broken and battered chairs don't sound like much, but man, these things are really worth a lot of $$ now (that box of dishes we got was worth $150 alone!!) and I won't pay $$ for things when they can be found for .00 even if in disrepair. Another neighbour had a good sale last year and I bought some unusual pieces of aluminum ware, some great vintage brooches and the cutest dinner bell in the shape of a tulip pixie. The year before DH's great finds, our church had a bazaar and it was INCREDIBLE. So many beautiful 50's linens! Church bazaars are the BEST. I miss them. Not many have bazaars anymore! GGG

I don't have any advice, but just wanted to say, I feel your pain! I can totally relate to what you are saying. We have a very hard time throwing things out too. And not because we pat ourselves on the back either, it is because we just can't! Sometimes I am jealous of those that can. I don't mean something like hoarding...I mean changing something out because we are tired of the old. We have two behemoth tube-style televisions. We do not watch much tv so we will never wear these stupid things out. One of them my DH won in a raffle with a $3 ticket before we were married. They are so annoying, but I just can not, even with great sales and deals, go buy a new one just because I don't like the old ones. None of our furniture (which most of it is previously used) "matches" but apparently it is going to last forever, so I will forever have mismatching furniture. That is the kind of stuff I can't get rid of. I try not to bring too much other clutter into the house, knowing I have a hard time throwing things in the garbage. I even cringe when I have to throw broken toys away, not because I think they aren't garbage, I just think of the space in the landfill a worthless broken toy is going to take and it seems so wasteful. Over the years we have really become way more selective in what the kids can bring into the house too, because of my dislike for things that break easily and have to be thrown out. Dedtired, where do you get stuff that you can put in paint cans to dry them up? Now THOSE I would love to get rid of!