Yard Sale Bloodbath

In his comment on our last post, Willy Callit mentioned one peculiar item we ran across:

Why on earth would anyone bother to keep a chocolate Nordstrom’s card for, apparently, decades?

I can’t really provide an answer to that one. But I can tell you who would bother to grab it out of someone’s free box …

I was just fascinated, especially considering it’s gotta be pretty ancient. (Nordstrom hasn’t used that logo in a looooong time.)

So I picked it up … although I already know it’s probably going to end up getting chucked into the ever-growing pile of stuff destined for my next sale. (See also: the yard sale catch and release program.)

After a week of relatively nice weather, Saturday morning started with dreaded rain. I am seriously ready for spring to start.

This week we had two guest stars, both first timers: Tokyo Rose and Willy Callit, both folks I know from doing roller derby. The first half of the morning was all of us catching up on what everyone has been up to. Jenny was probably bored senseless, but we all had a pretty good time. That’s a good thing since the sales ended up being the pits today. Even the sales that had pulled some items inside garages just had a bunch of junk. Wet baby clothes, toys, and books seemed to be the theme for the whole morning. Sales being cancelled due to the rain, and tons of driving in circles.

We hit some real duds and after grabbing some coffee we went to a school rummage sale. Sadly it turned out to be almost all kids donations, with a few books and records, and these clown figurines.

I became obsessed with this huge mound of plushy toys. I dared Jenny and Tokyo to jump into the stuffed animal mountain for $5. Some man leaned over and said “my son will do it for $5″ and I had to let him know that my offer was for adults only.

Tokyo bought this crazy board game from the ’80s that we were all fascinated by.

Next we hit two estate/garage sales. Really, is it an indoor yard sale or an estate sale?

Both ended up being a mish mash of different crap that didn’t seem to fit together. Once you are in a house you can tell when things just don’t seem like they belong. I loved the linoleum in the basement of the first sale and I left my phone number there to see about possibly buying it later.

At the second house, both Jenny and I were appalled by a woman selling reproduction floral barkcloth for $150. Ouch.

We drove around chasing after several sales where they had put tons of signs up, but ended up postponing their sale due to rain. In a moment of bad behavior Jenny pulled down one of these signs and threw it on the ground. This is something we talk about, but really never end up doing.

We wound down with what what turned out to be a sale being put on by folks from two local businesses, Velouria and Sonic Boom. Willy seemed a little bored, but was patient while the rest of us dug into the piles of women’s clothing. It was super cheap considering it had originally come from her boutique.

Both Jenny and I felt bad that our guest stars had chosen a day that turned out to be pretty lackluster. We told them to both come back another time when it would be nice and sunny out.

It’s one thing if a kid had written up this sign, but the fact that it was actually printed up like this … for a school fundraiser … well, that’s pretty bad.

Rumage: does that rhyme with plumage?

Thanks to Karl for the photo!

On Saturday we had the weather we should have had last weekend — sunny and quite pleasant out. Not surprisingly, there were a lot of sales in the area that had the snowed-out neighborhood sale last weekend. With plenty of sales and nice weather, it really felt like the yard sale season had finally started.

The first few sales we hit were pretty standard stuff — one had been advertised as “collectors paring down,” which sounded great, but the stuff they collected wasn’t really our speed. At one moving sale Meghan bought a stuffed toy dog (complete with bone) to give to her dog to chew on, which seemed wrong in a funny way. Then we went to a sale (whose ad called it a “do-over sale,” since they’d wisely bailed on having their sale in the snow last week) with a huge selection of decent clothes in a range of sizes (the seller said she’d lost weight, and seemed a little sad to see some of her cool-but-too-big clothes moving on).

I didn’t end up buying anything (every time I picked up some piece of clothing that looked good, it turned out to be in another shopper’s “pile”) but I did really like these girlie glasses. They were priced too high for me to be able to justify bringing more glasses into my house, though.

This sale was across the street from a house which did set up last weekend. I saw stuff set out on the sidewalk and thought maybe they were doing the sale again, but it turned out to just be a few boxes of free stuff — mostly books of the somewhat boring and crusty variety. I didn’t notice until looking at the picture that one box said “ETHEL.”

We moved on to a few more sales. One ad said “We shop too much and must have a sale to support our habit.” I could relate to that, but we didn’t seem to have the same taste. Another ad had read “Spin the wheel of fortune!” I thought maybe they’d have an actual wheel of some type there — either some kitsch doodad they were selling, or perhaps some kind of wacky pricing gimmick for their sale. But there was no wheel in sight. Meghan was talking to the seller and said “Hey, I’m here to spin the wheel of fortune!” The response was a nervous giggle, with no apparent recognition of the phrase.

We headed over to what we were calling “record guy sale.” He has a sale every year and sells boxes and boxes of records for a few bucks apiece, much to the delight of the many dedicated record nerds who make the yard sale rounds. I’ve bought a few records from him, but he also usually has cool books and other stuff, which is really what I was more interested in. On the way over, we stumbled upon another sale that was pretty cool. There was a really strange mix of books there — everything from radical anarchist zines to a Britney Spears bio. We started digging through the stuff when my phone rang … there was a slight emergency at home and I needed to cut my yard sale day short. My first-real-day-of-the-season joy was quashed! I told Meghan I needed to go back, although not before we finished looking through the rest of the books. I ended up buying a Jandek CD and a small pile of books, the most noteworthy being this little pamphlet.

Thankfully, everything turned out to be pretty much fine back at home. I was a little bummed about having to call it quits early, but what can you do? I love going to yard sales but really, there are plenty of things in life that are way more important. Meghan called a little while later to report that she went on to a few more sales, got a few more books, and wished she’d had her camera with her to document the collection of California Raisin collectibles someone was selling. So I guess I didn’t miss all that much by having to knock off early. And there are plenty of Saturdays still ahead!

We had been excited for weeks about the Phinney/Greenwood Neighborhood Yard Sale day. Excited because we consider it to be our “spring opener,” kicking off the yard sale season into high gear. Excited because it is usually one of our best days of the whole year. And a little extra excited because last year, it was the first sale we ever wrote about after starting up this blog. That’s right, Yard Sale Bloodbath is one year old … happy blogaversary to us!

So on Friday morning, I was disturbed to find an e-mail from Meghan saying “RAIN MIXED WITH SNOW. WTF???” That was the forecast for Saturday, which was alarming … especially since the previous Saturday was sunny and over 70 degrees. I didn’t want to believe it, and in the afternoon it looked like it was getting nicer, but by 6 p.m. we had full on snow. For real. In April. (You can see some pictures from the neighborhood here.) It was really not looking good for sales the next day. We figured unless we were completely snowed in we’d go check it out, but we didn’t have high hopes.

Saturday morning it actually looked OK! It was cloudy and about 36 degrees out, but the snow had melted away, and it seemed like it might just clear up. We headed out a bit early and started driving around the neighborhood. By now we have been going to the same people’s sales year after year, and our first stop was one we both remembered from years past, in a covered outdoor garage. Meghan picked up a pile of cool stuff. I made just one purchase: a pair of ugly gloves for fifty cents that I could not get on my quickly-freezing hands fast enough.

I had marked off certain sales that sounded promising, but a lot of them weren’t happening after all … big surprise. Most of the sales were in garages or otherwise sheltered. But some of them had their stuff out on the street. Which was too bad, because pretty soon it was raining.

We headed for a block which always has good sales. I loved this mannequin propped up outside a garage. Her head was cut off oddly on a slant (that you can’t really see in the photo) for reasons no one could really figure out.

Across the street, Meghan claimed the woman brings out the exact same stuff year after year. I believed her, but I couldn’t specifically recognize anything … until I saw this shot glass palette, which I completely remember checking out last year. Crazy.

By the time we left this block, it was full on snowing. It sucked, but it was sort of worth it to laugh at the fact that we were actually going to yard sales in the snow — a first, even for us. We kept driving around, stopping at plenty of lame sales that we normally would have passed by. Beggars can’t be choosers, right?

The snow situation was getting a little ridiculous so we decided to try and find the indoor rummage sales. Even these didn’t seem to be happening in some of the usual places. We did find one which was a benefit for the boy scouts. There was bagpipe music playing and nothing we wanted to buy.

Next we hit a really great sale a little off the beaten path. It was in a garage and they had all kinds of fun vintage things. A woman was hemming and hawing over whether to get this amazing Adam and Eve gravel painting. She ended up buying it, but let us snap a picture before she took it to its new home.

The people there had great midcentury kitsch stuff, like these bathroom fishes and seahorses. Cute!

I got a ’50s planter, two vintage pillowcases, and a Christmas Mambo CD. Meghan got a huge pile of really great books and CDs.

I know this isn’t a blog about the weather, but it was so odd that I have to keep talking about it. For a while there it was super sunny, but still snowing. Then it clouded up and the snow turned to rain, but somehow it felt even more freezing cold than when flakes were coming down. It was at this point that we hit the street where everyone seemed to have the idea to put tarps down over their stuff.

There was one sale with piles of intriguing clothes (under a series of tarps), but without my ugly gloves (left ‘em in the car!) my hands were too frozen to even dig around. The guy there said he was having a hard time fishing change out of his pockets for the same reason.

Sadly, we agreed that it was time to call it a day. We had pretty much covered the area and it was really not fun to be outside anymore. There was just one more stop to make before we headed home: a moving sale at a weird church that we’d always kind of wondered about. Note that it wasn’t a church rummage sale; it was an actual moving sale. The buildings were being sold so they were vacating the premises.

The dark and musty basement was filled with a variety of crusty junk, including a row of pretty cool antique vanity tables. We didn’t buy anything.

All in all, it was definitely the most pathetic Phinney sale day we’ve ever been to, but we still ended up with some decent stuff. And I think we reached a new level of devotedness (and/or stupidity) when it comes to the things we’ll deal with to make the yard sale rounds.

A few weeks ago I went back to Omaha for a reunion. Unlike my last visit, I was pretty limited on time for getting in some solid thrifting. I made sure I had a chance to hit up one of my favorite old haunts. I wrote about the greatness that is New Life Thrift a while back, and it’s still amazing.

Before I even walked in the door, I noticed this sign in the window.

I thought it was really strange that they would need to have a no guns sign in the window. Why? Well, turns out Omaha has a change in the concealed weapons permit law. What little I was able to gather is that if you don’t want someone to come into your place of business with a concealed weapon, you have to post something on your front door.

The first song I hear when I walk in is the Standells “Sometimes Good Guys Don’t Wear White” — is this the best thrift store in the world or what?

As always the place has tons of clothing, most of it priced in the $2 to $3 range (with mark-it wax pens and two staples) and often marked down to prices like 60 cents.

I was pretty restrained this time since I didn’t have much room to bring anything home, but I did pick up a few choice items.

We were excited to head out last Saturday morning in absolutely gorgeous weather — it was the first really spring-like Saturday we’ve had. The first two sales we hit were terrible and we wondered if things were evening out from our good day last weekend. The ads had sounded good but were completely boring. Although we did manage to take a picture of this lovely framed needlepoint piece.

The next stop didn’t do much to boost our confidence in the day. Tons of balloons in a part of town with no sidewalks = two of our classic signs that a sale is going to suck.

And in this case, the signs were right. Meghan snapped this photo of a bunch of junk laid out on a funky mattress sitting in the yard. We didn’t even want to touch anything here, let alone buy it.

While heading towards stop #4 we came across signs for a sale that hadn’t been advertised. We didn’t have high hopes, but that changed when we pulled up and saw two racks of clothes in the driveway, with a gorgeous peach colored formal dress up front. “How much for the Junior Prom dress?” Meghan asked the guy. He told her it was $5 and she grabbed it while also educating him about the fact that the shorter length meant it was actually a junior prom dress, not a regular prom dress.

There was a ton of stuff and the people had interesting taste, but wanted to downsize since they were moving into a new place. The sale continued along the driveway, into the garage, and even into another room hidden off to the side.

We were both fascinated by this humongous Jell-O Pudding box. I hope you can get a sense of scale — it was well over two feet tall.

And this pathetic dog painting captured our interest, although neither of us wanted to take it home.

Meghan ended up picking up a couple of small furniture items, including an amazing fold-out dining room table that we had to come back for the next day. It was $40 and when we returned the guy told her that many people had groaned realizing it was already sold. The wife was there on Sunday too and the husband revealed that she was not happy that he had sold the prom dress. Still, she admitted she didn’t fit into it anymore and seemed willing to accept that it was time to let it go. (Which was good, since it was already gone!)

OK, back to Saturday. We continued on to the sale we were originally trying to find, which was lame. Then we went to a sale that sounded like it would be totally freaky, advertising itself as raising funds for their trip to Burning Man (5 months in advance?). I didn’t think I would necessarily find anything I wanted there, but I thought it would at least be entertaining. I was disappointed to find it was quite normal.

Our last stop was a sale advertised as the estate sale of an antique dealer. It was in a garage filled with all kinds of amazing paper ephemera and other items: vintage postcards, road maps, menus, photographs, prints, calendars, magazines, etc.

The guys running the sale were the sons of the antique dealer. They told us some funny stories about how their dad would always be bringing home some dining room table or another, then he’d sell it later. They got used to thinking of their furniture not as possessions so much as things that would just pass through their homes for a while.

They were happy to let us take some pictures and when they found out it was for our blog, they even brought out this choice item just for us to get a good photo-op. It wasn’t for sale; they were planning to give it to some friend, who I hope was properly grateful.

We each ended up with a stack of photos and other items. (I bought Return of the Jedi wrapping paper!) They flipped through our stacks and charged us $20 each, which was a great deal. It was nice to end an already-good day at a sale full of interesting stuff run by friendly people.

Last Saturday we hit three sales total and it was a great day. Sounds strange, but quality over quality turned out to be true for us this time.

The first sale was a moving sale indoors and they had tons of stuff. I was little concerned when I saw some antique mall price tags on many items (not a good sign), but everything was cheap and what was super great was the amount of paper (ephemera) in this one room.

I tried to get photos from both angles and they really don’t do it justice.

It was a small room and there was still a lot of empty space, but there were stacks and boxes of all kinds of stuff to dig through. Old magazines, games, kids books, Broadway show programs, corporate literature, sheet music - you name it. We spent about an hour at this one sale, mostly in this room.

A couple of my favorite odd items: This photo of the pigs …

… and the breeding hamsters for profit magazine. Nice.

The next one was a total dud. A driveway sale with baby crap and expensive clothes ($20 for jeans is insane) and a used breast milk pump. (eeeu. gross)

The last one of the day turned out to be great. Tons of clothes for $1 each (and Jenny picked up a few cool kid things), and it was a really fun sale in a great part of town.

All in all a great day!

A couple of weeks ago my parents were in town and we wanted to go to some sales. Since we had my 3-year-old in tow we opted for one-stop shopping and hit a huge school-fundraiser rummage sale. This sale happens twice a year and you always hear people gushing about how great it is. It’s notable that these usually are not yard sale regulars.

I hadn’t been to this sale in years and didn’t really expect it to be great, and … it wasn’t. The sheer quantity of stuff was pretty impressive, and it was quite well organized, spread out into three separate areas in a multi-building school (the gymnasium and two other large halls). But it all just seemed so boring. (In fact, it reminded me a bit of what I imagine the Oprah hoarder sale would have been like, except for perhaps a slightly more diverse selection of goods.)

Also, it was crowded as hell (even showing up a couple of hours after it opened). I don’t mind dealing with crowds if there is good stuff, but when everyone is mindlessly shuffling through crowded aisles and trapping you in a corner just for stuff that seems it could have come from your average thrift store, it’s lame. I did spend some time looking around, and eventually came out with one book. One! (To be fair, there seemed to be a decent book selection — not super cheap, but there were a couple of things that I definitely would have picked up, if I didn’t already have copies at home.)

Since it was so uninteresting (other than the size and crowds) I wasn’t even going to blog about it, but when I looked at my photos they kind of cracked me up. Can’t you just feel the crazed shopper vibe? It almost seems like it should be from some rummage sale zombie movie.

Oh, one other thing: I saw a guy standing in the middle of the dish aisle, looking around through binoculars. That is definitely a first.

A few weeks ago Jenny and hit a couple of estate sales and it wasn’t amazing enough to do a full blog about, but a few things we bumped into seemed worthy of a quick post.

One of the estate sales was in an amazing house that had not 1, not 2, but 3 pianos! We went out through the backyard to see what was in the garage and it was a huge mess, but up next to the Genie garage door opener was a chandelier. WTF?

Here is the Auto Coffee Maker. Now, what is so odd about an automatic coffee maker? They are a dime a dozen … No, it’s a coffee maker for your car.

Is it just me, or does she look a little bit like Isabella Rosselini?

Finally, I really love this comb mixed with hair dryer.

I happened to watch Oprah last week (which is not all that regular of an occurrence!) and it was about this woman who had a serious hoarding problem. She had a huge house that was filled up to a truly alarming level. I guess she just really liked to go shopping … then she would come home and have nowhere to put any more stuff, so she’d just pile it on up on top of the already huge mounds of past purchases. It was definitely out of control.

De-cluttering guru Peter Walsh was there to help her get as much stuff as possible out of the house (which required a vast team of helpers) and to motivate her to stop buying so much stuff. There’s a summary of the whole episode, along with a whole bunch of scary photos, over here. (Here’s just one shot from the cluttered house. Yikes!)

The amount of stuff they took out of her house was amazing — it filled up a 10,000 square foot warehouse. When I saw the stuff all laid out I thought, that looks like a huge-ass rummage sale! And it turned out they did hold a sale with it all — making something like $13,000. (Which is a heck of a lot, but I actually would have guessed it’d be even more.)

Now I keep wondering about the people who went to the sale. Did they know it was for TV? Did they know it was Oprah? And did they realize that all of the stuff came from just one person?

It wasn’t really the kind of sale I would have liked to go to, since it was all newer stuff that seemed pretty ordinary. But I think if I knew the sale was for some TV show I’d want to go — not for a chance to be on TV so much as just to see how these televised sales are run.

I started getting curious about this a while back watching Clean House. On that show, the hosts convince people to get rid of a bunch of their junk (which is often quite the emotional ordeal), then they sell it all in a yard sale. They always show some of the people who come and buy stuff, often debating over purchases or haggling over prices. I’m just curious how it all works. Do they make everyone who shows up at the sale sign a release? Will they let you just shop and not be on TV or is it a package deal? Are there people who repeatedly seek out these sales — fans of the show, fans of the sales (seems like they let stuff go for cheap), or people looking for a few seconds of fame? And do people ever buy stuff they don’t really want just because they think they might get to be on TV?

While searching for answers to these burning questions, I found an online listing for one of the show’s recent sales. I imagine it may be taken down soon so I’ll just reproduce the text here. I’ve removed the address and date, but I assure you that the rest is just as it was written.

HUGE YARD SALE!!!!! Clean House is coming to your neighborhood! We will be taping an episode of the Style Network’s home makeover TV program at (address, date, and time). Get great deals on Furniture, Baby Clothes, dolls and lots lots more!!! IT’S GOING TO BIG!!!!!! And SUPER AMAZING!!!! You might even find yourself on TV! Clean House host Neicy Nash, will be there!!!

Let me just say that this ad doesn’t exactly exude professionalism. (”IT’S GOING TO BIG!!!!!!” And they misspelled Niecy … ) However, seeing this ad brings up yet another question: does anyone ever lie in their L.A.-area yard sale ads and pretend that their sale is for Clean House (or some other TV show) to try and get more shoppers there?

Oh, the mysteries of televised sales …

When I think of the phrase “thrift store photos” I usually think of the weird kind of pictures you can sometimes find while thrifting. Here’s one stellar example:

(More of that good stuff here.)

Of course, “thrift store photos” can also mean photos depicting thrift stores. I found this link to a recent exhibition of thrift store photos by Brian Ulrich via the ever-fabulous Ars Longa site. The shots are great, ranging from the colorful to the kinda gross.

The exhibition reminds me of a little book I got for Christmas, Thrift Store: the Past & Future Secret Lives of Things. If you’ve spent much time in thrift stores, many of the photos in the book may seem altogether familiar, perhaps too familiar: stacks of board games, necklaces hanging on hooks, lonely dolls … all the kinds of things you come across when perusing thrift store aisles, shown here in one small dose after another until you almost feel like you’ve been in the thrift too long. According to her bio the author/photographer, Emily Larned, is an “avid thrifter,” and the book includes a few short essays about the nature of objects and how they are used, valued, and discarded. The kind of stuff you get to thinking about after your 500th thrift trip or 8000th yard sale.

As far as thrift store art, there’s plenty of documentation out there on artwork that was purchased in thrift stores. I was first introduced to this “genre” via Jim Shaw’s mindblowing 1992 book, Thrift Store Paintings. (After discovering the book I was lucky enough to get to see an exhibit of some of the paintings in San Francisco, similar to the one pictured here. That stuff is even scarier in person.)

Online, you can visit the PSB Gallery of Thrift Store Art and the Hi Art Thrift Store Art Gallery for more scary thrifted paintings than any one person should probably stand to take in. I’ve also seen a few recent examples where people have taken thrifted artworks (sometimes original, sometimes mass-produced) and then altered them to stunning effect (like the examples shown here).

Now, what about paintings (or perhaps scarier, sculptures) that show thrift store scenes? That’s something I haven’t managed to stumble across yet. But I’m sure it’s only a matter of time …

About two weeks ago I noticed an ad on craigslist for an upcoming sale that sounded insane. The ad was titled “42 Room Hotel Estate Sale of Collector of Everything.” How could we not be curious? It didn’t have a location and went on and on about how much stuff there was, that you had to enter at your own risk, no children or beverages or large purses would be allowed in … it was frightening and compelling at the same time. I also recognized the estate sale company’s name from some online drama a few months back where someone kept posting some complaints about his ads that then kept getting taken down. I didn’t remember the details, but that added a little extra intrigue.

On Thursday I saw the ad again, this time with specifics. Turns out it was on Ballard Avenue, right in our neighborhood, and it started on Friday. Meghan and I made plans to go down around lunchtime and check it out. We had to sign a waiver basically stating that we were taking our lives into our hands by entering the building, then we trudged up the stairs. We were greeted with these signs:

They looked old, and sort of permanent, so we couldn’t quite figure out what the deal was. We got even more perplexed as we made our way through room after room, crammed full of all kinds of crusty old junk just as promised.

As advertised, the place was scary. The walls and especially the ceiling were sort of decaying before our eyes.

I don’t think there were a full 42 rooms open (the upstairs was closed off), but there had to be at least twenty-five, all full of stuff, plus hallways with furniture and whatnot. It was crazy. We figured the people running the sale might have brought in some extra stuff to throw in, but from what we could gather most of it came from the estate of the previous owner. Apparently he’d bought the building in the ’50s, then at some point had a secondhand shop up there — although that must have been quite a while ago as neither of us had ever heard of this. He died about six years ago and for whatever reason they were just now getting around to clearing the place out. (Someone said they were going to turn it into office spaces after some extensive retrofitting and renovation.)

The amount of stuff there was sort of amazing. Impressively, it was almost all priced, which must have taken ages. Unfortunately for us the prices weren’t all that cheap. And there was definitely a ton of stuff that we wouldn’t have bought at any price. Like this box o’ chew.

Or this demented picture:

However, I definitely would have bought this king crab mounted on velvet … if it’d been a lot less than $125.

There were a ton of great and weird old signs in the place. I liked this one for some place called The Cedar.

My favorite sign in the place was this one:

I wish I could have taken it home. It was in a room with bookshelves on every wall and a table piled high with magazines in the middle. I got really excited when I started looking through them until I realized they were about $8 each … too rich for my cheese-lovin’ blood.

Paperbacks were a reasonable $1, and I kept grabbing books from the shelves with crazy titles like “White Satin Wench” … but most of them had their covers torn off! It was tragic. I did pick up these four classy titles.

The very last photo I took was this:

Right after the flash went off the guy running the sale walked by and snipped, “Don’t take photos.” Oops. Then someone else said (about the sale guy) “Oh, he was a crank back when he worked at Goodwill.” Not sure what that referred to but I got the feeling there was some history there. In any case, we had both already taken plenty of photos (even more than the ones in this post — check out the whole set on Flickr if you just can’t get enough.)

We headed to pay for our few items. Meghan had grabbed one pattern out of a pile. The guy said “Those are two for a dollar. So you know that’s one dollar, right? I don’t do fifty cents.” Meghan told him he could put it back then, paid for her other stuff, and headed downstairs. I had my four paperbacks, a tiny Jello recipe booklet from 1934, one dishtowel, and a slightly beat-up original Lynda Barry “Poodle With A Mohawk” poster for $10 that I just couldn’t pass up. (I saw something scribbled in the corner and got excited thinking she signed it, but it turned out someone else had signed it. Oh well, it’s still cool.) The total ended up $20 and he threw in Meghan’s pattern. I was happy about that until a few minutes later when I thought wait a minute … did he overcharge me for something? Later I discovered the Jello booklet had been priced at $4. I had thrown it in the pile thinking it would be $1 at most. I totally wouldn’t have bought it for $4, but it was my own dang fault for not noticing! I kicked myself until I finally realized that it wasn’t worth getting too upset about spending three whole dollars more than I’d meant to.

After we left, we went to grab some lunch. Before we even sat down, we marched straight to the bathroom and washed our hands. Twice.

Last Saturday was the first day in a while that there were some decent-sounding sales on a day when both Meghan and I could get out. Meghan pretty much summed up the rummage sale that kicked off the morning. I have just two things to add. First, 7:30 a.m. is waaaaaay too early to be listening to bouncy-disco-techno-pop. Second, I’m pretty sure these three shirts came from the same person.

After leaving the rummage sale we headed to our next stop, a moving sale not too far away. We decided to make a coffee and snack stop since the sale hadn’t started yet … and were thrilled to stumble upon this place. We each got a scone and were amazed by their deliciousness. You may not know that Meghan and I are pretty passionate about tasty breakfast treats, to the point where we could probably fill up another blog all about baked goods … but since this is not that blog, I will spare you any further discussion, other than to say the scones rocked and we’ll probably be back to sample more elaborate delicacies such as the Nutella Breakfast Panini (!).

It took us a while to figure out which house the sale was supposed to be at. We found the address, but there were no signs and it was completely quiet. Meghan was about to say screw it, but I boldly walked up the stairs to peek inside and saw things with price tags on them — yes! A guy walked over and let us in. It’s always exciting to be the very first people at a sale. They didn’t have that much stuff, but it was a pretty interesting mix, with a good selection of vintage stuff priced to move. I picked up a great mirror for $5, Meghan got a cool wooden chair and a box of various other items.

Our next stop was a sale that promised tons of women’s clothes from eight different people. They had great eye-catching hot pink signs, but the view from outside the house didn’t bode all that well …

The clothes were arranged very neatly in the two front rooms. There was some good stuff and it was all priced to move. While chatting with the woman running the sale, we learned that she was a professional clutter-clearing consultant. “Are these clothes from your de-cluttering clients?” I asked, and sure enough, that was the case. It was slightly disconcerting thinking that people had paid her to help them get this stuff out of their houses, and here we were about to give her money to bring it into ours. I had grabbed a bunch of stuff but ended up putting most of it back, just buying a pair of pumps for $2 and a heavy wool Dale of Norway sweater for $3.

After that we headed to a sale which said that everything would be free — I guess that doesn’t really make it a sale, does it? We were curious about it, but it was a little too early when we got there. The place looked like a dump and there was one guy waiting around in front. We decided not to join him, and headed to a different sale … that also wasn’t quite open yet. It was in an office building, and we could see through the windows that it was pretty much all furniture, so we decided to move on. We saw a guy we knew who was waiting there, and he told us that he had gone to the Friday night opening of the chorus sale. He said it was just okay, but they did give everyone a nice bottle of wine to take home, so that took some of the sting off the $25 admission donation.

Our next target was a “mansion sale” in a ritzy neighborhood. It took us forever to find it, but when we finally got there we saw it was an amazing-looking house — we figured if nothing else it would be cool just to walk around in it. Wrong! The sale was confined to the basement, and it was total crap. When we saw old lady shoes from the ’80s priced at $25, we knew it was time to bail. As we were walking out I heard the guy saying about some item “oh, I didn’t mean to put that out — that’s an antique!” Ugh.

It was too bad we bothered to waste all that time tracking down that worthless sale, because the next sale was probably really great a half-hour earlier. Walking in, signs announced that it was the “Townhouses Ate Our Ballard Neighborhood” sale. This made us laugh because it is so true. Ballard (our neighborhood) has seen an insane amount of new condos and townhouses built in the past few years, with no signs of stopping anytime soon. This home (probably built in the ’20s) had new townhouses on either side, one in the back, and new construction underway across the street. The owners had been there for 20+ years and I guess they couldn’t take it any more, especially after getting get nasty complaints from their new neighbors for being too noisy on their back porch … and they really didn’t look like the kind of people who’d be whooping it up loudly! It was a really cool house (that I hope doesn’t get torn down and replaced by 4 townhouses).

One thing that cracked us up here was this sign. The woman said that last time they had a sale, some “dealer” snatched up all the jewelry. Most people would not really think that was a problem, but I guess she felt that she needed to make the jewelry-purchasing more egalitarian.

I bought a few things, including ten cool old postcards. Note that I already have a probable lifetime supply of postcards considering I use maybe three per year. I was on the fence about whether to spend $3 on a shirt, then decided it was worth it after the woman said she bought it in Paris last summer. I’ll admit it: once I heard that, the shirt somehow seemed cooler. Meghan scored a vintage Stetson hat for $3 (that the guy ahead of her in line was drooling over) and some other cool stuff that I don’t even remember.

There was one more stop to make before we called it a day. We pulled up and saw the sale in a freestanding garage and I said, “Oh, no … is this that sale we went to before?” It was, and we almost just left, but I was curious if it had gotten any better; last time it was just full of new tools and crap from their now-closed “online store.” This time was definitely an improvement. I still didn’t buy anything, but at least I didn’t think they were completely high on crack.

All in all it was really not a bad day. It’s great that the season is starting to get rolling! We even managed to buy enough for a halfway decent trunk photo.

The Seattle Men’s Chorus and Seattle Women’s Chorus Annual Rummage Sale was held this weekend. This was our first time going to this 3-day event. It started on Friday night as a preview sale — for $25 a person. We debated going, but in the end we couldn’t justify spending that much money just to get in early, and decided to go at 7:30 am on Saturday instead.

The sale was being held at the old Crypt location (a local sex toy and leather goods store) and they sure had a ton of stuff, most of it men’s clothing but with various electronics, housewares, and other stuff as well. This photo only shows one corner of the sale.

It was clear that they had spent days getting it ready, but the pricing was a little off — pants for $5, but dresses and shoes for $2? It didn’t make sense.The men’s clothing looked really good (aside from a couple of scary pairs of Joey Buttafuoco pants), but the women’s was a little on the stale side. I mean a purple shirt with cats? Might as well have a bumper sticker that says “crazy cat lady”.

Since this was a benefit for a chorus, one can only imagine the singing that went along with these tapes (and they had many, many more). Erasure anyone?

One thing that really cracked me up was this large selection of bandanas (or handkerchiefs or “hankies”) that had obviously been displayed prominently, probably as a sly wink at the legendary handkerchief code of the gay community.

I found a new Votivo candle right as we started to check out. The man that rung us up told me that the Seattle company was recently purchased and would no longer be making their candles. Bummer since the red currant is my favorite candle.

After picking up a couple of baked goods from their table we headed off to the rest of the sales on our list. I’ll let Jenny talk about those …