Yard Sale Bloodbath

Meghan found a (now-removed) Craigslist ad (how? who knows) for a 52-hour sale which happened in Minneapolis a couple weeks back. I think this is absolutely insane … but in a genius kind of way. And I’m impressed with their stamina – we are usually ready to pack it in four and a half hours into our sales!

From the ad:

Do garage sales that close up at 6pm annoy you, how about having to wait until some arbitrary time when the seller decides to get up and get their sale running. Well worry not. We are running the 52 hour garage sale. We started at 5pm Friday and we are going until 7pm Sunday non-stop.

Clothes, furniture, legacy computer parts, new computer parts, printers, gadgets, kids items, toys and much more!!!! And if you think this is crazy, there’s going to be a couple time slots (30min ea. 4 times) during Sunday’s sale, where nearly everything is 75-90% off!!

The most kick-ass part is that the sale was OUTSIDE.

Due to various other obligations I haven’t been able to go to sales for the past few Saturdays. I went to a few Friday-morning sales last week, but they were so lame and boring that I actually wished I’d just stayed home. And I did make it to the Olivine sale that Meghan blogged about earlier (purchasing 3 shirts and a pink Hobo purse; all cute, but nothing mindblowing). But those excursions just aren’t the same as doing the full Saturday run of sales for a few hours.

It must be going to my head, because last night I had a crazy dream about a rummage sale. In this dream, Meghan and our friend Shari (who has maybe been to sales with us once or twice a few years ago, but is not a regular guest star) were waiting outside for the rummage sale to start on its first day (Friday). It was some legendary sale that had always been really good, so we were excited. I was trying to decide whether I had time to go – I think I was supposed to be at work, but in the end I decided to go in “just for a few minutes.” We all picked up baskets (like the kind of basket you carry around at the grocery store, which they had a stack of – like that would ever happen at a rummage sale!) and I quickly grabbed a vintage polyester shirt with a cool flower/geometric pattern (the print looked more 40’s even though it was polyester like a ’70s shirt) and a couple of other little things that I can’t remember. I know I was in a quandary thinking “which room should I go into next?” and getting a little overwhelmed, because the place was huge.

I’m not sure what happened next, but later in the dream I was back at the sale in the evening and I was talking to my friend Jenny (yes she is also named Jenny) on the phone and she was urging me to go in because the end of the first day of the sale is always the best part (which makes absolutely no sense whatsoever, but that’s what she said in the dream). I was outside of the sale and I was holding these pants that I was really excited about: they were white terry cloth bellbottoms with big turquoise and purple swirls on them. For those of you who don’t know me in real life, please be assured that this is not really anything I would ever wear, let alone get really excited about finding at a sale. I told Jenny I was going to go into the sale after I went and put the pants into my car (I’m not sure why I had them outside the sale if I hadn’t been inside yet, or why I was going to go put them into my car instead of paying for them). Then on the way to my car it occurred to me that Meghan and I still hadn’t decided if we were going to have our sale the next day and we still hadn’t done signs or an ad and we were running out of time so I called her to discuss this and … that’s about all I remember.

The sad part is that the last part is almost true. It’s Thursday night and we still don’t know for sure whether we’re having a sale this Saturday. Earlier in the week it said it was going to rain, but now it looks like it might be okay, so we’re in a quandary. But we definitely aren’t going to wait til Friday night to decide! Tomorrow morning we’ll check as many weather reports as possible, consider any other mitigating factors, and decide whether it’s on or not. Since we were originally going to have the sale three weekends ago we are getting anxious to get all our sale crap out of our houses. But on the other hand, it’s really no fun to have a sale in the rain …

Olivine is a swanky boutique in downtown Ballard. The girls that work there (and usually the owner) have had a yearly yard sale in front of the store for the past three years, where they sell off clothes and accessories they want to get rid of. Both Jenny and I have gone each year with interesting results. Pretty much everything in the sale is nice, but might be too small or not the right style. Plus, you have to grab stuff super fast. Many items are high end and it’s a good idea to be there right when the sale starts. This year (and I think last year) a percentage of the proceeds went to a local breast cancer fund.

The last couple of years I have walked away with some really amazing stuff and last year I spent over $200 and left with like 4 pairs of Sven Clogs, AG Cords, Citizens of Humanity Jeans and other nice items.

This year I think we started to get ourselves into a complete lather about how good the sale would be this year. Maybe I should learn that’s never a good idea, since nothing can really be as good as your mind can make it out to be. This year was good, but maybe not as good as past years. There were a lot of smaller sizes (heck, I haven’t been a size 27 since the mid ‘90s) but I still managed to spend $180. Here’s what I picked up:

• 2 skirts (one 3 Dot and one Cosabella) – both are larger sizes and I thought would be good for summer. Both make me look like a total fat ass.
• 1 pair of AG velvet pants that I really like, but won’t wear until winter. One pair of AG cords that I don’t like. One pair of jeans that I like.
• 3 pairs of shoes – 2 that I like and one pair that are cute, but are too big once I really got them home and walked around in them.
• 1 Hobo wallet in purple – that I really love.
• 1 Hobo clutch in black.
• A pair of Citizens cut-offs for $5 that are too small.
• 1 black Harvey’s seatbelt bag (made out of actual seatbelts!).

On Saturday morning, I had a really queasy stomach. I had a root canal earlier in the week and woke up at 3:00 a.m. in pain, so I rolled out of bed and took a pain pill. I forgot that you can’t take pain pills on an empty stomach, so in the morning I was in agony.

Being the yard sale trooper that I am, I thought that I could work through it. I drove to a sale that started at 8:30 and when I pulled up I thought I might get sick, but I turned off the ignition and just stopped to get some fresh air. The sale was a total bust, but I was proud of myself for keeping my composure. I was able to get about 15 blocks before I had to pull into a parking lot and get sick out my car door. I was really embarrassed.

I was feeling pretty defeated and I headed home for a day of TV and the couch. I washed up, drank some water, and after an hour was feeling good enough to give it another try.

I hit a couple of sales, but I didn’t buy anything and I wasn’t feeling very good. Then I saw a sign for a block sale. Most of the sales on the block had family items, baby clothes, toys. I was thinking that I should just go home.

Then I saw a box of new Aveda products and I started grabbing stuff before even asking the price. I had my hands filled to the point of not being able to hold anymore. I spotted another box of large size Aveda hair products. A few other shoppers had started to grab stuff and in my weakened state I wasn’t very pushy. All small items were $1 and all large ones $2. I filled one box, then started in on another box. The woman owned a salon and didn’t want to carry the Aveda line anymore.

Most of the items still had price tags with the original boxes. I ended up spending a little over $50. I think you can see from the photo that I got a screaming deal.

I went home happy.

Over our many years of going to sales we have noticed some indicators that more than likely, the sale is going to be a waste of time. Of course, none of these are 100% accurate and even the worst-looking sale can turn out to have some gems (as Meghan can tell you, once she pulled a pair of big-E Levi’s out of a bin at a sale which seemed to have nothing but junky toys). However, with so many sales out there, sometimes you want to maximize your chances of finding the best sales by skipping the probably-lame ones.

Here’s our list of things that make our suck-detectors go off:

• The sale is excessively hard to get to. It always seems unfair that it’s not the other way around. If you have to work really hard to find a sale, it seems only fair that the payoff should be great. Right? Sadly, it doesn’t seem to work that way. Most of the times when we’ve been led down a circuitous route to a hard-to-find sale, via bad or missing signs or a confusing address, it turns out to be the worst sale of the day. I don’t know why.
• The signs are drawn by kids.
• Balloons are present.
• They only have about six things out for sale. The odds that they are going to be the six things you are looking for are really, really small.
• The sale just looks bad when you drive past it.
• It’s in a part of town with no sidewalks. This might be specific to Seattle, but we have found that the no-sidewalk-land sales tend to be skippable.

Again: there are exceptions. So don’t start getting all smug because you went to some sale with hand-drawn signs and balloons that was out in the furthest reaches of the no-sidewalk part of town and it was the BEST. SALE. EVAR. We’ve been to good sales that fit each one of these guidelines. But as general rules to help figure out which sales aren’t worth our time, we think they are fairly reliable.

I wasn’t really planning on going to sales on Saturday. I thought I might stay home, work on getting items priced for our re-scheduled sale, go to the dog park, and maybe clean the house. In the end I woke up early, had some coffee and headed out around 8:00. Even being on the fence, I had printed out some sales the night before — just in case.

I have this habit of really being organized when I print out my sales and I even highlight what time they are open and the address, placing the sales that look the best on top and then dividing them up by area. Not today. The very first sale had no address — in fact I found 2 listings with no address. I mostly just drove around to see if I could find any signs.

The first sale was held by the Seattle Women’s Rugby Team. Nice ladies, but really bad sale. Video tapes, bad books and t-shirts were the bulk of what they had. Honestly, the sales started out crappy. They either had nothing, everything was priced way too high, or they didn’t have anything out yet. I don’t mind that if it’s before the sale opens, but when you list 9:00 as your start time, you should try and have most of your items out.

One sale had been listed as being a benefit for Doggie Hospital Bills (way to pull at my heart strings!) and out of the 5 girls doing the sale, 3 of them worked at Nordstrom. BINGO! I didn’t lose my mind as much as I could have. I did purchase a large rolling Roxy Hawaiian suitcase that I remember seeing at Nordstrom last year (for a whopping $110) and I talked her down from $20 to $15. I purchased some (unopened) Clarins and Kiehls products, a copy of Madonna’s SEX book for $3 (I never actually looked at it until now) and some nice new candles. Final bill: $32.00.

I hit some serious duds today and I was almost ready to give up when I hit 2 different estate sales. At the first one I purchased some really cute 80’s clothes (one T-shirt says “Rip It!” with wacky 80’s cube patterns) and 3 different Boy Scout/Cub Scout books.

The next one had started the day before and it looked like folks had walked all over the house.

This sale was what I can only describe as “Crafting Gone Wild” — this woman crafted/collected way beyond what I would consider normal. In fact I would put this out as a warning to not purchase yards of fabric, patterns or yarn that you don’t need and won’t use.

I was excited to find the box for a Jewel Toned Owl purse, but it turned out to just have more knitting magazines inside. I did take a photo of the box, since it was pretty cool.

All in all it turned out okay for a day when I didn’t even think I was going to go to any sales at all.

I was going to add to the recap yesterday, but then Meghan sent me this link and poking around the rest of the site pretty much sucked up my afternoon – especially after we discovered a photo of a chainmail-wearing teddy bear named “Sir Snuffles of Gund.” Eek!

We did take a little while to get out of the house, partly because I showed up late and partly because we couldn’t help sitting around watching Meghan and Leslie’s dogs go nuts together for a while. Our first stop was the cash machine, near which we saw this … art project? Whatever it was, we liked it enough to take a picture.

Leslie and Meghan talked about the Downsizing Sale. I was poking around in the stuff outside for a while and kept being surprised at not finding much. Eventually I did pick up a huge plastic/tupperware type thing for holding rolls of wrapping paper. Owning this makes me feel a little bit like a demented housewife who gets way too excited about sales at Target, but it’s actually really useful for getting my random rolls of wrapping paper (mostly thrifted/yard-saled) out of the way. There were some rolls of paper included, which were mostly cute (a few will be donated or featured at the yard sale we’ll eventually get to have).

After quite a while in the house we were just about ready to go when I discovered a whole big office room in the basement that none of us had even noticed before. There were three huge bookcases filled with books and at first I wasn’t sure if they were for sale, but as Meghan mentioned, everything was for sale. I asked how much and the woman said “Most of them are a dollar each, but if you find something you want I’ll probably sell it to you for like a quarter. Except for some of the first editions are more.” I started looking through and ended up with a huge pile. Everything from Dante’s Inferno to weird fiction authors I’d never heard of before to the Tibetan Book Of The Dead to an exhibition book from some recent group art show in Brooklyn. Meghan found the aforementioned Last of the Mohicans “stash book” (looks like a hardcover book but is really hollowed out to store … stuff) and then found another one which she handed over to me, made to look like Homer’s Odyssey!

I figured that I had enough (even though I also knew if I made a second pass through the shelves I’d probably find more) and went upstairs to find out how much my stack would be. The woman having the sale pulled out two first editions I’d grabbed kind of randomly just because they looked interesting (Seamus Heaney and a facsimile edition of a Yeats book) and said those would be more. Eventually she said $30 for the whole pile – $10 each for the first eds. and $10 for the rest (about 15 books). I told her I’d do the stack but even though I was sure $10 each was a good deal on the other two, it was too much for me. She said “But I really want you to read them!” and came down to $5 each, on the condition that I promise to read them. So now I got some reading to do, along with the whole other stack of books, along with my already too-big waiting-to-be-read pile at home. Yes, I have a bit of a problem (and as Meghan says, it’s hard not to pick up books at sale when they are so cheap compared to buying them new, or even used!).

The rest of the sales weren’t as good, and the rain was really starting to come down, which made shopping a bit more difficult. I was feeling sorry for the thrift stores who were probably going to get a lot of soggy donations later (some people didn’t have their stuff even remotely covered; others had tarps laid over here and there). Most of the rest of my purchases were for my kid: a pair of red and white checkerboard Vans (too big, but she’ll grow), an amazing kids’ vintage bowling shirt, a big tub of Legos, and of course – another copy of Corduroy, this time with all pages intact. Yes!

The only other notable item to report is that Meghan purchased a rice krispie treat that didn’t suck. Oh, and that thanks to Leslie’s Mad Libs, I probably won’t be able to stop myself from singing “Jingle Boobs” a few times next holiday season.

We had a brief debate about whether My Little Pony stuff was collectible or not. Our unscientific verdict was that the older ones probably were but the newer ones probably weren’t. Regardless, this sign made us laugh.