The last time I was in Canada, one of my sisters and I deposited our husbands and children somewhere and went on a shopping tour of Eastern Ontario. We love nothing better than taking off for an afternoon without a map or a planned route, to let our whim take us where it will. On this day, we stopped by the Tay River in the town of Perth for lunch and a coffee, and continued along, stopping at a number of antique shops on the country roads. The most memorable of these was Rideau Valley Antiques. Luckily I had a camera with me to capture the chaotic collections in their yard. The shop is housed in a turn of the century country farmstead. We found the rooms crammed with junk that had been sorted: dinnerware, teapots, soup tureens, and other porcelain in the former living room, sports equipment in the hall, tins in the kitchen, bottle openers hanging from the ceiling.
I went back a second time to take photos and to buy baseball gloves for my boys. The photos are some of my favorites:
In need of a slightly worn garden hose?
...or a rocking horse?
...or perhaps a rusty wagon from the considerable collection at Rideau Ferry Antiques?
They don’t have a website, but I found the shop listed at Antiques in Canada. If you are travelling in the area, be sure to shop by – at least for a chat with the owners, a couple of brothers if I remember correctly.
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My favourite spot for this type of chaos was Gary Davis’ place in the old Thoburn Woolen mill here in Almonte. It was a ramshackle two story brick building crammed to the edges with all sorts of bric-a-brac brought in from who knows where. Gary used to buy the contents of whole houses or buildings and government castoffs so that every visit to this “store” was always an adventure. I bought a light table from him near the end of his career and now use it to seat my menagerie of computer equipment. This desk was used in the old days to project light from underneath up through transparent maps and is huge.
Gary was not adverse to haggling on the prices which is something not often done in North America. This building has recently undergone a total refurbishment as condos and only the ghost of Gary remains.