If our spare time wasn't busy enough at the moment, we decided to make a 100 mile trip up north to Bay City to poke around Michigan's largest antiques mall. The Bay Antiques Center covers an entire block and is crammed full of vintage goodies from cookbooks to old hinges, vinyl to road signs, you could seriously spend hours there.
Housed in what was once a hardware store, the store holds over 60,000 square feet of offerings across three levels. In fact there's so much we actually antiqued out, there was just so much you could go through, flick though and devour that it's hard to take it all in. There's lengths of walls filled with stacks of vintage doors to pillars, piles of old letter presses, old door knobs and tiles - it's a perfect place if you're thinking of fixing up an old home and need some original pieces. We left with a bag full of vintage cookbooks and some more 1970's/1980's metal on vinyl - all in all a very worth while trip.
Prior to wandering around the antiques mall we ate lunch beside the iced over river in the Veterans Memorial park and had a quick drive around the old part of town, certainly going to be a place to check back in the warmer months -5C wasn't the perfect weather for a picnic or wander around I have to admit!
The Bay Antiques Center can be found at;
1010 N. Water St, Bay City, Michigan