Yard Sale Bloodbath

I missed out on all of those lame sales Meghan suffered through last Saturday because I was in Vancouver, BC for the weekend. Hitting the area’s thrift stores used to be a required part of any visit there (or almost anywhere else). I still have tons of Canadian thrifted goodies in my house. But I find more and more that I just can’t be bothered with thrift stores, at home or anywhere else. Sometimes I’m kind of sad that the thrill is gone, but I’m pretty much okay with it.

We drove by this thrift store and I was fascinated (and somewhat disturbed) by this painting that was on display in front of the store. Not fascinated enough to stop and get a closer look, but definitely fascinated enough to snap this picture from the car window to share with you all.

I went to some of the worst sales on Saturday. Sometimes the luck just isn’t there. I had taken a friend out for her birthday the night before, so I had a mild hangover, and I had to be home at 10:30 for a new door we are having delivered. I thought I would do a couple of hours and go home. I don’t mind going to sales alone, but I usually end up with less of a plan and I get turned around or end up a sale that I already went to.

I hit a lady’s moving sale at 8:00 am and purchased a few books for a dime. I asked her why she was moving, and she told me she was moving because her mother is dying. Not the best way to start off your morning sales. Then I hit a sale that had some great old bikes and older collectibles, but nothing that I needed. I just picked up some magazines from the free box.

I hit few more duds and then went to one of the worst sales I have ever seen: the Loyal Heights retirement home sale.

I can only assume that most of the old and/or good stuff they might have owned is long gone. As you can see, they had tons of stuff, but all of it was crappy. I did think the Little Rascal next to a broken dog crate was funny.

The prices? $3.00 for paperbacks, if that gives you an idea of what they wanted for their crap.

A few weeks back I went to a sale that these two older ladies had, where they said that they planned on having many more “estate sales” this summer. I explained to them that I hate people that put on yard sales and claim they are estate sales when no one died. I ended up back at their sale anyway and was kicking myself, but I did end up buying a handful old View-Master reels. The best: Fat Albert and Shazam!

I stopped for a sale and when I walked up the steps they had 2 saw horses saying the sale started at 11:00! What is the point of even having it?

I figured I would go back at after the door was delivered. This sale ended up being the topper to a shitty Saturday. At 11:00 they let a huge group of us in – I guess I wasn’t the only person that came back to see what they had. What a bunch of crap! The prices were some of the highest I have ever seen. The clothing had large prices tags saying shit like “$30 – great deal! Was $172 new” or “$20! Over $100 in 2003.” WTF?

Here are my scores for the day – not enough to even bother opening up the trunk for.

We were excited to discover that a Japanese blog, Retro Junk, is linking to our site! It looks like a fun blog, judging from the photos in some of the other posts. Of course, we can’t actually read it, but I did notice that they mentioned our post about signs that a sale is probably going to suck. Meghan had the bright idea to run it through an online translator, and this is what it came up with:

The original post did not mention leprosy, but I would have to agree that it would be a pretty bad omen for a sale.

We’re stoked about the link. Hello to any Japanese visitors! I’m sure the post makes much more sense in its original version, but the bad translation is pretty entertaining. And I gotta admit – I like also to look at the trophy of the person.

While in the process of getting the very last bit of our crap together for the sale, Jenny and I still managed to squeeze a quick stop at another sale on Friday afternoon.

This sale seemed a little dubious since the ad listed a lot of high-end vintage. Really, I donʼt mind paying good money for something that isn’t run of the mill junk. The flipside to that is I am not going to pay Antique Store prices for something that you just tossed out on the lawn. The sale was about 16 blocks from the part of town that we live in, so we figured what the hell, right?

Turns out that we knew the woman having the sale from going out to yard sales. For the few people we see at sales that we both think are complete assholes, we do see some people every few weeks or so that are usually really great to see out on a Saturday morning.

Even for going late in the afternoon, she still had tons of stuff. Most of it was nice, but since we both had been in purging mode we mostly chatted and looked at what she had. Jenny bought a purse and I picked up a pair of jeans and a 40′s striped decanter that I was bummed to discover had a chip on it when I got home and took the tape off the lid. I was happy about the jeans, so it all works out in the end.

This is one of the first times that we took photos and the person knew why we took them.

She came over to our sale on Saturday, proving once again that collecting stuff doesn’t stop just because you are trying to purge.

Yes, after a couple of delays it really happened: Meghan, Leslie and I had our sale. It was really fun, and I am also really glad we got it over with.

I’d gotten my piles of stuff priced and ready to go about a month ago when we’d first planned to have it … then when we had to postpone it I just left everything in one big heap in my basement. Then a few days before the sale I got on a roll and gathered up a couple more boxes of goods. I really got re-motivated to get rid of stuff and I probably would have come up with even more if I hadn’t run out of time. (Not too worried about it; there’s always next time …)

Friday morning we crafted our Craig’s List ad (featuring the word “craptastic” and threatening early birds with steaming hot coffee poured down their pants). I had some hot-pink posterboard left over from our last sale so I made some signs. My 9-year-old niece was at our house and wanted to help, so she made some too, even though I just wrote about how kid-made signs can be a sign of a not-so-good sale. We put our signs up around the neighborhood on Friday night, proudly noting how much better ours were than everybody else’s.

I was planning to get over to Meghan’s house around 7:30 on Saturday morning, but it was closer to 8 when I actually got there. As we hauled all our stuff out to the yard, I started freaking out a little about how much we had, getting a little worried that we wouldn’t be able to get everything set up in just an hour. Thankfully we have done this so many times before that it actually went pretty smooth. We tried to keep things more or less in their own “departments,” like this purse area (and some of the clothes area) shown here.

There were a few early birds, but most of them were cool and backed off (or drove away) when we told them we weren’t ready yet. There were so many sales around that there wasn’t a huge gathering of vultures circling around ours. We did have a big freebox set up on one side of the yard to try and keep people entertained. By 8:45 about five or six people had gathered around, doing the thing where you kind of hang back on the sidewalk a couple feet away craning your neck out to try and scope out the goods without being too annoying. At that point we were more or less set up so we just decided we were open for business.

We had a little extra ambience from Meghan’s next-door neighbors, who were having an art show in their front yard. They had a few paintings up on easels and were just kicking back, waiting for someone to come by who just happened to feel like dropping a thousand bucks on one of them. No, I am not kidding. You can see the easels in the background here (this is about half the yard of our sale).

The neighbors were playing reggae music pretty loudly from a stereo they had for sale out front. This was a bit irksome. Meghan kept saying “I wish they weren’t crazy so I could ask them to turn that off.” I just kept thinking that as far as unasked-for music goes, it could have been a lot worse than middle-of-the-road reggae. Thankfully someone did buy the stereo after a couple of hours.

A lot of friends came by and kept us entertained (and even bought stuff) and we had a good stream of people coming through for the first few hours. We forgot to take an “after” picture, but I think we sold more than half of the stuff we’d put out. Around 12:30 we started slowing throwing more things into the freebox and by 1:30 we were actively packing stuff up, saving a scant few things for another sale or purpose but putting most of it out on the curb. It is always kind of funny to see people totally going nuts digging through a pile of free stuff and getting all excited about things that they never even would have considered buying for a quarter. (I’m not judging – I’ve been guilty of this myself plenty of times.)

After counting all our money (and trading a bit between ourselves for the stuff we bought from each other, of course!) I ended up with about $85, Meghan made about $200 (she always seems to make the most money at our sales) and I think Leslie had $65. If you divided my take by the time I spent preparing for and having the sale, was it worth it? It’s not a really great hourly rate of return, but it was worth it to me because I had fun, I saw some friends I hadn’t seen in a while, and I sent a lot of stuff off to good homes (or at the very least, out of my home).

On Sunday Meghan and I each took down some of our signs (because we are good yard-sale citizens) and I grabbed the dregs of the free pile to take to Goodwill. And now we are done! Until the next one, anyway …

This Saturday is one of the first times that I felt like there was a first half and a second half of going to sales. The first part of the morning was Jenny, Leslie and I going to sales as normal, and nothing really remarkable happened. Then around 11:20 we dropped Jenny off and the sales took a turn to the Bizarre. Jenny already wrote about the first half, so here is my re-cap of the second half.

First, I had a minor road rage moment where some guy in a big SUV made this couple almost back into me. I wagged my finger to him to GET OFF THE PHONE and he flipped me off.

We drove to one sale where I wasn’t even sure if we should get out of the car. Leslie made a comment like “everything looks really crappy” but she meant it in a crappy = interesting sort of way. It just felt like we started to hit more odd-ball sales.

The next one was a house that I usually think is having a sale, since she has so much garden shit in her yard that it looks like she is having a sale (out of the corner of your eye).This time she really was having a sale and it looked like every free item ever from Craig’s List had landed in her living room. Horrible.

We spent almost an hour at an Estate Sale that at first frightened us and then started to fascinate us. First off, the gate to enter the yard was super creepy. If you have been looking for a creaky sound effect of the scary variety, I found it. In fact I opened and shut the gate three times just to hear it. As we walked in you could tell that some serious smoking and drinking had gone on in this house.

I found a 1970s Play-Mate Of The Year nudie puzzle (that I am currently putting together on my kitchen table) and then a minute late Leslie found the ultimate chubby-chaser puzzle, Bridget!

We headed into the basement and started to find boxes of photos and I noticed that a few of the photos are folks hanging out at The Tin Hat (a bar about 11 blocks away), which is now more of a punk rock bar, but has been a local Ballard tradition for years. In the ’70s the basement had been turned into a small apartment, but it looked like no one had lived down there for the last 25 years.

Leslie left me alone in the basement and I started to get creeped out, so I grabbed a box of photos and we camped on the living room floor to look them over. I didn’t buy as many photos as I could have, but I did get a few photos from the ’60s of about 3 couples dressed in adult bunny suits getting drunk in a bar. (Must scan later – they are insane.) I also found some acetate record plates and a ’70s Hawaii shirt. Total price tag — $7.50.

Fuzzy (The Roofer) and his wife Inga lived a pretty fun life (or so it seemed) and I was pretty happy to get a little glimpse into their life.

Friday morning we made a decision just to hold off on doing our sale until next week. The weather looked okay, but we decided to just take a little bit more time to get ready. That meant going to other people’s sales instead of having ours! I met up with Meghan and Repeat Guest Star Leslie and we headed off. I was pretty stoked to be hitting sales again after a few weeks off.

The first few sales were pretty unremarkable. At one, we all became captivated by something called the “Carousel Soldier.” None of us wanted to buy it, but we asked if we could take a picture and the woman said sure. My camera was having some problems so it was taking a while and she was like “Or you could just buy it for $1.50 …” She had a point, but we finally got a picture and just moved on.

At another sale on that block I picked up a great pair of purple and black leather kids’ cowboy boots for $10. I thought that was a bit high for yard sale prices, and they are way too big for my kid and I usually don’t buy stuff that she won’t fit into within a year or two, but these were great so I just splurged. As we drove away Meghan was muttering about how the lady was completely on crack; I missed it, but Meghan had asked her how much she wanted for a pair of clogs and she said $55. At a yard sale! Crazy.

We spent the next couple of hours circling around in our neighborhood. We never really made it out of a 20-by-30 block radius or thereabouts. We ventured into no-sidewalk-land for a couple of sales. One was pretty cool and had this great sign:

I didn’t buy anything there, but Meghan got extremely excited when she found a ginormous tennis ball, perfect for sending her dog into a frenzy with, without risking the heartbreak of having it roll under the couch.

The other no-sidewalk sale was at this really big house with these very skinny preppy ladies. There was stuff spread out everywhere. They had a crazy amount of elaborate Halloween stuff and a TON of kids’ games and toys. Their prices were pretty high, it was decent stuff, but they had stuff marked for $5 that you could probably buy new for like $8 – that’s not usually enough of a deal to make me want to buy it at your sale. I asked if they’d take less on one thing and they said no, so we left. As we drove away I had to tell Meghan and Leslie about two things I saw there that disturbed me: a “Countdown To Your Wedding Day” clock, and a pink plaque that said “My Prince Did Come – His Name Is Daddy.” Insanely, this plaque was priced at $7. I am sure that they were packing most of that stuff back into the house at the end of the day.

A little after 10:00 we went back to an estate sale which we’d passed earlier with a line starting to form. We walked in and saw a ton of Fiestaware, which Meghan loves, even though I believe technically she is not allowed to buy any more dishes. As I walked into another room I heard her telling the cashier that their Fiesta prices were crazy.

Most of the stuff actually seemed pretty overpriced, including this fine gadget:

Just when I was about to give up on the sale, I went into the basement. This was another sale where the woman was way too into crafting and way too into saving every last bit of wrapping paper, thread, or whatever. It seemed like she had been pretty well organized, but there was way more than anyone could ever really use.

I started gathering up some of the cooler wrapping paper and vintage cards. Leslie and Meghan came in and started digging through, too. They were stoked to find some old Christmas stickers from various years of the past like 1958 and 1964. I picked up a set of card-suit cookie cutters (always kinda wanted some) and some corn-holders shaped like the front part and back part of a dog (so the corn makes the body). Leslie suggested they might be entertaining for my daughter, which is true, but I think I’ll be plenty entertained as well. I wasn’t sure if they were going to want crazy prices, but it seemed like they only really cared about the stuff they priced; the woman taking money didn’t even look through my stuff, just sized up the pile and said $3.00.

We kept thinking we’d tapped out the neighborhood but there were always more sales just around the corner. Finally around 11:00 we decided to drop off some stuff back at Meghan’s. I had been planning to keep going for a little while longer, but I decided to call it a day. An hour or so later I got a call from Meghan sounding a little freaked out by some of the sales they went to later, and I had to wonder what I’d missed out on. I couldn’t tell whether I should be jealous or relieved. I guess I will find out when she does her blog.

Here are the goods from the first part of the day. Please note my fantastic vintage barbecue set. (Thanks again Leslie for pointing that out!)