Well, friends… The Covered Cauldron has been brewing up quite a few changes!
The website has been completely redone, and I have learned approximately seventeen thousand things about becoming a dropshipper. There was much clicking, occasional confusion, several technological battles, and at least one moment when I considered moving into the woods and becoming a decorative hermit.
But I finally have it figured out—and we are off and running!
You can visit the newly redesigned website here:
The Yard Sale Has Gone Online-ish
The yard sale is absolutely not gone. It has simply moved online for the most part.
We’ve been having much better luck selling our treasures through Vinted, which makes things a little easier for us. There is considerably less hauling, lifting, displaying, packing up, and wondering why we own so many things that require three people and a small forklift.
You can visit our Vinted closet here:
Shop The Covered Cauldron on Vinted
We are also planning a humongous Memorial Day weekend yard sale next year, featuring Victorian couches, furniture, household treasures, curiosities, and all the things we weren’t able to sell over the winter.
And believe me, friends… there is a lot.
George and I have lived a very full life, and apparently our hobbies have been collecting other people’s hobbies. We have filled our spaces with an impressive amount of stuff.
We are also beginning to scout for someone interested in vintage Volkswagen dune-buggy-type treasures, including frames, bodies, motors, and assorted parts.
We may also have someone interested in purchasing a 1978 GMC Jimmy that was actually in a movie once.
No kidding.
The Great Stuff Revelation
When my brother Mike’s house had to be dealt with, it just felt wrong to throw everything into a landfill.
We carefully went through his belongings and tried to make sure that anything sentimental found its way to the right person. Sometimes that meant saving family treasures. Sometimes it meant finding homes for things that still had stories left in them.
While I was at my brother’s house, standing in the middle of his wife’s massive collection of “stuff,” I suddenly had a very serious realization:
What the actual fuck am I doing?
Because I have a whole lot of stuff “hoarded” in my own house that I don’t need.
I realized that I can live with very little—and that is now my goal. We are lightening our load of everything, except for craft items that I can repurpose, remake, and use to be creative with.
It was such a big realization that it made me revisit everything.
Why do we have all this stuff? Why do we keep shoving things into attics and closets and garages as if hiding them means dealing with them?
Stuffing something in an attic doesn’t make it disappear. In some ways, it’s not much different from sending it to a landfill—it’s just a landfill with worse lighting and more spiders.
So we are sending these items out into the multiverse for other people to enjoy, use, love, repurpose, or benefit from.
Little by little, we are getting it done.
We finally sold the H.R. Pufnstuf creepy-ass figures, and I was genuinely thrilled to see the blow-mold nativity set leave the house. It had a long and meaningful life, but it was time for it to go forth and bless someone else’s living room.
We also now have someone who is going to help us clear a lot of the scrap and accumulated stuff from the yard.
We are blessed.
In a witchy way, of course. ✨
Remembering Mike and Debbie
One of my favorite examples of why this matters involves my brother Mike, who was married to Sherry. Sherry’s brother, Paul, always called Mike “Tiny” because Mike was, in fact, a very large man.
After both Mike and Sherry passed away, Paul put T1NY on the license plate as a tribute to my brother.
That is exactly the kind of meaning we hope to preserve when we sort through estates and old belongings. These aren’t just “things.” They are pieces of people’s lives—and sometimes they still have a little magic left in them.
We’ve had to do the same thing with my sister Debbie’s belongings. After she suffered her strokes, many of her things ended up safely tucked away in our attic.
Debbie told us to throw it all in the trash—but she clearly forgot who she was talking to. 😂
I still need to get more of her belongings to her daughter so she can decide what she wants to keep and what she may want to share with her brothers.
Because around here, “just throw it away” is rarely considered a legally binding instruction.
It takes time to sort through a person’s belongings, especially when those belongings carry memories. We want family members to have the opportunity to look through everything, find the sentimental pieces, and decide what should continue on to the next person.
That’s really what The Covered Cauldron is about: keeping useful, beautiful, strange, meaningful, and sometimes downright ridiculous things from being lost forever.
Someone loved these things once—and sometimes they’re just waiting to be loved again.
And Now… The Cinnamon Rolls Are Back!
After taking a break because of health struggles, we’ve found a way to bring back our fresh-from-scratch cinnamon rolls in small, manageable batches.
For Labor Day weekend, we’ll have:
- Original cinnamon rolls
- Maple cinnamon rolls
- Blueberry cinnamon rolls
We’ll have 24 of each flavor available for preorder, and they’ll be $5 each.
If they don’t sell out through preorders, the remaining rolls will be placed in the Cauldron Cupboard for walk-up purchases.
We may even make a second small batch if the first batch disappears faster than a witch at a church picnic.
Cash and Venmo are accepted.
These are big, fluffy, fresh-from-scratch cinnamon rolls—the kind that barely fit in your hand and make you briefly forget your responsibilities.
We use local blueberries and local eggs whenever possible, and every batch is made with love, flour, sugar, and probably at least one mild kitchen meltdown.
One More Thing…
I’m also going back to finish a book I started years ago!
Now I just have to figure out how to end it. Hopefully the characters have some ideas, because they haven’t been very helpful so far. 😂
Maybe this will be the year I finally finish it—or at least get far enough along that I can stop pretending it’s “resting.”
Thank you for supporting The Covered Cauldron through all of our changes, learning curves, health struggles, estate sorting, online yard-sale adventures, decluttering, and occasional technological nonsense.
Every order, visit, share, and kind word means more than you know.
Please support local. Shop small. Eat cinnamon rolls. Save the treasures. Send the stuff back out into the multiverse.
We’ll see you at the Cauldron! 🖤✨