Monthly Archives: June 2014

Compared to last weekend, this week has been blessedly quiet.  Last Thursday marked the last day of school for my son Aidan.  He had a blast on Friday and today he was “so bored.”  I caught him counting days on the calendar until school is back in session.  I’m not sure if I should be insulted or not =p  I got very little done with my most recent acquisition of Breyers.  It’s a constant battle around here to find room for anything much less hundreds of plastic horses.  Listing horses for sale starts with unpacking them from whatever they were packed in originally.  As any collector will attest to, Breyers make impressive dust magnets.  Most of the horses get washed in the kitchen sink.  This involves first washing the endless mound of dirty dishes.  If you want to actually use to kitchen for oh say, cooking, good luck using the sink!  After the horses dry I take pictures of them and write up a description for the sales listing.  As I have an increasing number of duplicate models, I have started to tag them #1, 2, 3.  Then they get repacked into one of my sales bin and hopefully I remember to write the horse’s name on the inventory list for the bin.  It’s a huge hassle to dig through all of the sales bins for that one horse that I forgot to label.  Which has happened more than once so I suppose it’s not just that one horse…  When a horse sells I unpack it from the sales bin, put it in more bubblewrap and pack it in a shipping box.  This is highly inefficient and takes a tremendous amount of time.  By the end of the day I never want to pack another horse.  I’m not sure whether to be pleased or disgruntled when I wake up in the morning and see another order awaiting shipment.

On a slightly more interesting note, this is what our porch looked like after we unloaded the UHaul.

You can’t see them in the picture but there is a nice assortment of boxed Breyer Wildlife.

You can click on the pictures to see the sales listings.  I still have more to list including a Breyer Ram, Goat, Cows and an assortment of bulls.  There are probably 100 NIB Breyer horses.  The vast majority of those were put into bigger boxes and immediately stored in the garage.  I truly have no space for those!  I brought in my first bin of horses from the garage today and you should see some if their listings pop up on Ebay tomorrow 🙂  Most of the horses are Fighting Stallions and Silvers.  Oh how I would love to keep those Silvers!  For now, they’re drying by my kitchen sink =D

Conversations around my house often go something like this:

“Can you df.sdfds..?”

“What?”

“I said can you asdf.fadsf?!”

“What?  I can’t hear you!”

“WHAAAAT?!”

“STOP YELLING AT ME!”

Between the three of us, we mumble a lot.  And while he won’t admit it, Aidan has maxed his skill in selective hearing.  Where am I going with this?  Well…  I have been receiving a discouraging number of broken Breyers in the mail.  The most recent was a beautiful high dollar custom that arrived directly from the artist with a broken tail.  This one really had me bummed.  I shipped him back to the artist yesterday to have her work her magic.  This morning I woke up and eyed my increasingly large number of ‘needs fixed’ Breyers on the shelves.  I pulled out a few with broken ears and some super glue and some baking soda and my dremel…  Do you see where I’m going with this =D  When I was done, the horses had five new ear tips.  Sort of… At least they did for a few minutes.  Feeling rather pleased with myself, I rinsed them off in the sink and set them out to dry.  I turned my back and one of the Hallas promptly took a flying leap off the counter, hit the kitchen floor and broke her ear.  Sigh.  Here are the five badly behaving Breyers after I fixed them.  One of the Hallas is fashioning her newly chipped chipped ear!

And here is a better picture of one of the ears.

I will be the first to admit that I am absolutely no expert in repairing Breyers.  I travel and show with my custom finish Breyer horses quite a bit and this has resulted in a number of breaks and dings.  The horses with breaks have always been sent out to be professionally restored.  The most I have done is touch up a small ear rub or something similarly minor.  Buying Breyer collections in bulk has supplied me with a nice assortment of cheaper Breyers to practice restoring.  I’m looking forward to spending some time doing this without the fear of ruining one of my show horses.

Hopefully, these five Breyers will soon have their hearing restored.  And just because he’s cute, I present to you Jemez Hallelujah.  He is a custom Breyer Stormy by Lynn Fraley and he can hear you just fine 🙂

This is what my living room looked like yesterday.  We have quickly discovered that space in this 1,200 square foot house is an erm, problem.   I’m fairly certain that I could lose Aidan in the chaos if he would ever stop talking =D  The shelf on the left wall is new.  There is one above it too.   I have been using those shelves to store horses that are currently at auction. The Breyer Clydesdales on the shelf with the sad case of Toilet Paper Head syndrome are sold and waiting to be shipped with some additional purchases 🙂   Everything else that is ready for sale is packed away in Rubbermaid bins that have packing lists taped to the sides.  Or at least, that’s the idea.  The little table by the sliding door is also new and holds my photo tent and lights and stray horses…  The photo tent used to be on top of the Rubbermaids that are now tucked beneath the table.  It’s so very nice to not have to kneel down to take pictures!   If you can spot the camera tripod in the chaos, that was my Birthday present =D  My little shipping scale is on top of the heater to the right of the table.  The bird to the right of that just wants all this ‘stuff’ to go away!  The garbage bag on the right is full of bubblewrap and there is another next to it bursting with packing popcorn.  And, oh, I found Aidan!!!