G’day lovely beach cottage ladies, today some vintage beach cottage decor for coastal style!

Righto let’s get to it…one girl, two roadside scores.

One morning a while ago I was driving the school run, not thinking of beach decor at all,  full of the happiness and the joys of the day, ‘cos I am such a bright and cheery mummy in the mornings ;-)  ahem perhaps a few of the Beach CottageCrew may have just a teeny problemo with that lol…

Queuing up at the lights I noticed that the street opposite had stuff outside…cha-ching!

….now of course reigning myself in and not wishing to cause any embarrassment to any of my offspring, who are, to be quite frank, sick and tired of me going on and on about vintage beach cottage decor stuff and squealing at the latest thing I have found, I kept myself most in check.

Then I saw the wooden box.  Did it or did it not have coastal style / beach decor about all over it’s beautiful little self?

Now this street is lined by units (that is Australian for flats or apartments) which means that the road has lots of parked cars on it…so not easy to pull in, especially when a. most people are rushing on their way to work  or b. some hideous mother behind you is late

And because of Late Mother behind, whose nose was very nearly in our boot, I definitely couldn’t stop, there would have been school run carnage…so slowing right down to a crawl, I yelled out to the other inhabitants in the car about the box…asked one of the BC Crew to hop out of the car, grab the box and meet me further down the road.

Nope.

Not a single one of those babies, that I’ve worked my fingers to the bone for ;-) would get out of the car and get it for fuel my vintage beach cottage decor fix.  There were all sorts of different pleas to my more sensible side as to why they were sitting firmly in their seats….along the lines of we didn’t need any more stuff and it wasn’t cool to run around the streets looking for old wooden things and stealing them from out the front of people’s apartments.

Big humpy sigh.

Late Mother is now beeping her horn.

And I am cruising very slowly past.

All the way to the school I am justifying that it will still be there on the way home…errrm lady it’s an old box and no-one else is thinking vintage beach decor for it….get to first school, throw child out, race to next drop off and do the same with little one, flinging school bag after him (thank you lord for Drop Off Zones outside schools in Australia).

Driving back I am rationalizing…no-one else on the beaches has the slightest interest in that old, broken wooden box…it will still be there when you go back…to oh noooooo what if another old-vintage-loving-crackpot-white-paint-yielding woman sees the same potential in it as me?

Anyway.

I race back, turn the corner up the street and can’t see it and see Old Short Guy (no it wasn’t my husband) ferreting, in gloves & overalls no less, in the piles of stuff lining the road….OMG he’s gonna get it first!…he must love old beat up hand-made wooden boxes too!  He must want to make this into some kinda vintage beach decor!

Then I saw it, I think he’d actually moved it to ferret.

So I pull up, jump out, slam the car door and run across the road, whereupon I leap onto the old wooden box.  The old ferreting guy doesn’t even look up from his business rooting through someone’s old papers…and you think I’m the weird one.

I pick up the box, and go to cross the road, when a voice calls out.

“Excuse me love, what do you think you are doing with that?”

Oh ****!

WHAT AM I DOING WITH THIS???

Then I saw a twinkle in his eye, registered his English accent, clocked his sense of humour and realised he was pulling my leg and left.

Never have I stashed a find, hopped in my car and fled the scene quite as quickly as this one.

Then there’s the oars.

A much less exciting story…

After a long and I mean long day at a beach carnival, we drove home, absolutely exhausted…all I wanted to do was put the roast in, have a drink and get in the bath, I think I was almost delirious from the sun on the way home, imagining the roast smells wafting around while I wallowed.

Can I just say I was not thinking about coastal style or beach decor at all.

All of a sudden Mr BC pulled over.  I thought it was to show me a house he liked the look of.  I didn’t even turn my head, I just grumped something incoherently like “I can’t possibly even have any energy to look at anything”

He didn’t move the car…I was irritated…he just nodded to the left.

I mustered all my energy and turned and these two beauties were leaning on a Real Estate Agents ‘Sold’ sign.

Oooh.

Nice.

Very nice.

Beach Decor.

Yes.

Great condition.

But with a vintage patina.

A lovely deepened old wood.

A shabby kinda varnish.

Faded sections where the oars hit the boat.

We ummed and ahhed because ladies there are only so many oars a girl can have in her life, right?

But stuff that Mr BC hopped out and threw them in the back anyway.

The kids slid down and hid.

And that my vintage beach cottage decor loving friends is where I will leave you.

I had vague ideas about a shoe box for the battered old box but after close examination it might become a veggie garden container (because btw my salad growing has come on in leaps and bounds) and the oars?  Well they were gonna be zapped with white but I dunno they were speaking to me when I took the before photos…I think they might just like a clean.

Perhaps I’ll put them in the bath with a roast :-)

I’ll see you all next time.

Be good.

And don’t be scared if you see something old on the side of the road this weekend, just put your head down and think of England.

p.s. any ideas on uses would go down well…