Yard Sale Bloodbath

The original plan was to have a yard sale last Saturday. We even spent a couple of weeks planning all the details. Heck, I even spent an hour in my basement pricing items – something that I loathe doing and usually put off until the very last moment. Then it rained on Monday, on Tuesday, and again on Wednesday. Come Thursday it was time to have a “Come to Jesus” moment and get real about calling it off. After planning to have a yard sale and then having to cancel, it just made me more determined to go out and hit some sales.

We planned on meeting at 8:00 am, but I’m pretty sure that we didn’t make it into the car until 8:30. I am unable to remember the first two sales before we got to a sale that had been listed as “Downsizing Sale – From 3000 square feet to 40′ boat” – and they really weren’t kidding.

The house was amazing and it had a to-die-for view of the Puget Sound. We hit the back yard and it felt like a yard sale outside, but inside it felt like they still lived there and nothing was priced. None of us knew what was for sale and what wasn’t. It was a really wonderful house, but it felt like nothing was sale in the house, when in fact everything was for sale.

I found 7 wire locker room baskets for a buck each inside on a shelf. I purchased cosmetics, something that I sometimes feel is a good idea and sometimes the person skeeves me out and I don’t want anything touching me that the person used. She seemed nice (a.k.a. not gross) and it was nice stuff – Chanel and Bobbi Brown, mostly unused. Plus, I get in a frenzy of needing to grab stuff right away when I should use more common sense …

I grabbed a bunch of jewelry, some of it not my style, but I knew it was nice stuff. The one thing that I’m really into was a turquoise necklace with large beads. Something that I would never buy for full price, but for a buck – who cares! In her kitchen I picked up two Le Creuset Stoneware 2-quart pitchers, one in blue and one in red, for $5 each.

I will let Jenny talk about the books that we scored, but I am pretty stoked on my “Last of the Mohicans” hollow stash book. I spent $35.25 at the sale and we pretty much filled the car with that one sale.

This week we had our friend Leslie (a.k.a. Bitch On Wheels) come along with us to yard sales (after being forced to admit rain was likely and cancelling our plans for our own sale). We always like to have “guest stars” come saling with us once in a while, and we talked Leslie into doing a guest star post for the blog as well – here it is!

As we had to postpone the crap-be-gone yard sale due to rain, we took advantage of the unscheduled morning to grab steamy cups of coffee and add more stuff to our already cluttered houses. In spite of the steady downpour, there were a number of sales featuring merchandise under tarps, under tents, in garages, and one fantastic house-wide moving sale (the sellers were purging just about everything to move onto a 40-foot sail boat and they were cool people with wonderful and reasonably priced stuff). I’ll leave it to your regular YSBB hostesses to describe the haul, but we more than filled the trunk with junk at that one sale alone.

Later in the morning, we drove to the Ballard High Cheerleaders garage sale (go blood-thirsty beavers!). There was nothing remarkable, but I picked up a pair of adjustable kids inline skates (a gift for 4-year old Lemmy) and a booklet of Christmas Mad Libs. I LOVE second-hand Mad Libs, particularly when they’re already filled out. While this booklet was 99.5% unused, a single plural noun was filled in on the Jingle Bells Mad Lib. Some snickering youth had inserted the tried and true word “boobs.” (Note to America’s pre-teens: body parts are fine, but adding a disease or taint to your chosen body part always gives it a bit more comedic punch). We proceeded to fill out the remainder of the Mad Lib, but it was too early in the morning for prime ick-factor vocabulary and Jingle Bells really doesn’t make the best Mad Lib foundation.

More sale recap still to come!

It was one of the most beautiful days out last Saturday, so I knew there would be tons of sales. Since both Jenny and I are trying to get ready to have a yard sale next week, I planned (in my mind) to only go out for 3 hours and to only stay in our neighborhood.

I didn’t notice that I didn’t have my camera with me until I went to what I can only describe as a “bachelor pad sale,” in a good-sized house filled with nothing that I wanted to buy. It was an estate sale, and it was pretty clear that he lived alone. The house wasn’t exactly dirty, but more masculine than domestic. Up for sale were crappy albums, Playboy magazines, car and motor-cross magazines, really butt-ugly clothes, plastic glasses, tools, and some of the most nasty furniture known to man. This house would have been ripe for photos, but it was 9:00 am and I was about 40 blocks from home, so I wasn’t about to go back for the camera.

Most of the sales I went to were just sales, nothing to really talk about, nothing really great for sale — I went to three sales that only had baby stuff. I hate baby sales! I would call these three “hidden” sales, since I would have just done a drive-by, but the sale was either hidden on their back porch or behind a large fence or shrub. Fuckers.

I went to a sale and purchased 3 vintage ’50s era lampshades. I need to be honest here and say that this takes my lampshade collection up to 4 that don’t have lamps they go with. Since the shades are harder to find I used to buy them and pair them with lamps, but these days it’s hard to find “the good stuff,” so I haven’t seen anything that goes. The 2 smalls ended up being $5 and the large was $8. I also purchased a red Bakelite stirring spoon.

I didn’t really get to see too many freaks this weekend, but one of the last sales I went to was an estate sale on my street that started at 10:00. I really don’t go to them very often when they start, since I don’t like standing in line when I could be at other sales. The house was old and I was feeling that it could be worth it, so I got a number (eek! NUMBER 46) and got in line. I figured even if the sale was crappy it was in a huge house built around 1908 so that would be cool.

Everything inside was old, some of it much older than what I collect, and I think my mom would have loved some of the china and other items. I found a pretty orange brown honey comb Bauer bowl right away. It was pricey at $15, but with no chips I thought I would carry it around with me at the sale and then make up my mind.

The woman who’d lived there was a rock hound and the whole basement was filled with rocks, polished and not, tons of cigar boxes filled with rocks. I picked up two 40′s handbags, an early copy of Walt Disney’s “Thumper,” another wire-handled basket (I fear I’m getting a little TOO into those) … and the most odd thing I purchased: BOOZE! She had two unopened bottles of Amaretto and Creme De Cacao, both sealed, and both for $2. Alcohol doesn’t go bad does it? Anyone want to come over for Grass Hopper Cocktails?

We have generally found that there aren’t a ton of sales on the Saturday of a holiday weekend (like Memorial Day or Labor Day). But last Saturday there were a good handful so we went out for a few hours. Most of the sales were just so-so. We went to one fundraising sale where I found nothing, but donated $2 for a cookie (Meghan got a rice krispie treat which once again was sub-par – what is up with that?) About halfway through she ran out of money when she spent the last of it on a small vintage stained glass window (muttering all the while about how her boyfriend was going to think she was insane for buying it). A few sales later I mentioned that I had only spent $5 the whole day and she said with a horrified look “You mean all of that stuff in the trunk is mine?” Sadly, this was almost true.

We went to one sale in the carport of some new townhouses where just about all there was were trashy platform shoes and computer games. The girl there asked us what we were looking for, claiming that she could probably produce it from her house. She boasted about producing some “ruby slippers” in just the right size for a previous shopper. We just left, and agreed that we had both sort of wanted to take a picture of her and her odd selection of stuff, but didn’t even want to ask because she probably would have been too into it.

The best sale of the day came a bit later – an estate sale that didn’t sound all that great from the ad, but turned out to be pretty cool, with a house full of crusty but kinda fabulous old junk. Meghan spotted this picture on the wall:

“How much is the ponytail girl?” she asked the woman taking money by the door. “You mean me?” she replied. “My sister drew that, long ago.” It wasn’t really for sale but it almost sounded like she was thinking about it. Meghan said “I’m not even going to ask you then” and we moved on.

We were also pretty entertained by this collection of old Frango boxes (and entertaining button selection. Do it! Do it Now!)

After that we decided to call it a day and go have breakfast. We ended up stopping at a couple more sales along the way where I bought an orange phone for a quarter that turned out not to work, and a hilarious book called “Sexercise” with line drawings of a man (with fantastic 70s mustache and sideburns) and a woman demonstrating the “exercises.” Still, my contributions to the trunk were pretty meager!