Yard Sale Bloodbath

I have been back in Seattle for over a month, and as winter has set in we aren’t thinking of yard sales as much as we usually do. I have had the last bit of my Omaha blog hanging over my head and slowly my mind is getting more fuzzy about what I purchased and what stores I hit.

Omaha has TONS of thrift stores, and I found my love of junking from going to thrift stores there while in high school. Sadly, many of my favorite stores have either closed or been taken over by a chain thrift store. My biggest disappointment was the closing of the best and largest Salvation Army that I have ever been to.

One of my faves is still going strong: The New Life Thrift Store, on the outskirts of Omaha in Bellevue, NE.

The prices are dirt cheap and its overall quality is super high. Plus, the staff is genuinely nice. They have some of the best prices in Omaha. AND they have a bizarre room of T.V sets.

I took a photo of our cart (sort of like our trunk photos) and you can tell that it’s filled. My friend Kelly bought maternity dresses and ice skates. I spent $14.85 and bought 18 men’s shirts (at prices ranging from 50 cents to 99 cents) and one woman’s dress for $1.95.

One addition since the last time I was in Omaha is “the bins.”

They are much smaller than the Portland bins, and less sketchy. When I say less sketchy, I mean that you aren’t going to cut your hand open trying to dig a pair of pants out of a bin.

One thing you should know if you want to thrift in Nebraska or Iowa is that you can’t go on Sunday since they are closed. This is the bible belt. I forgot this fact and tried to go hit some places in Council Bluffs, Iowa. All of them were closed.

Now, antique malls can be really good. Most of them are in the Old Market in downtown Omaha. One exception is the Brass Armadillo which boasts an insane amount of vendors (375 in 30,000 square feet) and really it’s HUGE. I had great luck here 5 years ago, but this time, eh. Nothing. I did take this amazing photo of this chalkware Nebraska cow that I secretly wanted to buy, but it was just too large.

The flipside of that experience is Second Chance Antiques. A place that I have followed to 3 locations and over 20 years. It’s a little messy and oddly organized, but the prices are fair and the quality is high.

Across the street from Second Chance is Fairmont Antiques, filled with tons of vendors with various levels of quality and price. I did find a dealer after my own heart with her space almost 100% filled with purses.

While I was in the Midwest I was able to hit up some sales with an old friend and his sale partner in Omaha, Nebraska. Marc and Ron hit sales and auctions every weekend with a cast of characters that rival the pickers in Seattle.

A couple of things that set these two apart from me and Jenny is that they are both professional pickers and they start going to sales at 6:30 AM. The first time we went out was the day after I got there. The 6:30 wake-up call was a little harsh since it’s two hours later in Omaha and the thought of my body clock going to sales at 4:30 AM is even out of the realm of my obsessive compulsion for sales.

A few differences between sales in Omaha and Seattle: They have sales on Thursday & Friday. They have more auctions then we have. It’s not that uncommon for the entire contents of a house to be pulled outside and auctioned off.

Another oddball thing I noticed at the sales was the lack of women. There really aren’t very many females who hit the sales early. In most cases I was the only one there.

So, the overall plan for sales in Omaha is this: Look over all the sales in the paper (they don’t use craigslist) and work out the top three or four sales to go to. Narrow it down to the one sale to hit first, and be there two hours early to get numbers and/or be the first in line.

This works out well, except if the sale is really bad and you wasted an hour waiting in the car or on someone’s porch for a bad sale. They pass the time by talking about scores that other pickers found before them, or by teasing each other. The best line was Marc telling Ron that he needed Imodium for his mouth.

While waiting outside at one sale, they pulled this car onto the lawn and put up flags.

At another sale they had boxes and boxes of items sealed into box tops with tape around them. If you wanted one item you had to buy the whole box. It was sort of like the bags of jewelry you used to find at thrift stores. Marc said that Heartland Estate Sales was the only company that did this.

One of my favorite sales was an estate sale of a former Tangier Shriner and his wife.

It was a decent sized house and I purchased a really cool Tangier embroidered shirt and hat (instant Halloween costume for next year) and a group photo of some Shriners from the ’60s. They had a lot of other interesting items, too.

Some of the sales we hit just didn’t seem worth the time, but how great are the sales in any town in early November?

With Meghan back in town after two weekends away, last Saturday we just had to go out and make the rounds of whatever piddly sales were out there, even though it was bordering on drizzly when we headed out. There wasn’t much advertised, and some of the listings didn’t appear to actually exist. We almost missed one of them because they just listed the intersection and said “look for signs” — which would have been great if this wasn’t the only sign they had.

I still can’t believe we actually saw that from the street. The sale was in an apartment and the stuff was about as bad as the sign.

We went to one moving sale where they had a few interesting things. Meghan bought some books and two pieces of carnival glass. When she unwrapped it at home, she discovered they had only put one piece in there, so she had to drive all the way back and get it — then the lady gave her a hard time about whether she had really paid for both.

A “rummage sale” at a cafe turned out to be two tables of vaguely interesting stuff. At least we got coffee and snacks. Another sale up the street from there was in someone’s garage, mostly full of new crappy tools. The woman said they were going to have more sales with different stuff soon, so even if we didn’t want any tools we should come back. “Did you have a store?” I asked nosily. “Sort of … an online store,” she said. The non-tool items were things like boring votive candle-holder sets for $10 that I can’t imagine anyone ever would have ordered online. Oh well.

Neither of us really had the saling vibe so we decided to knock off pretty early, making one last stop at an estate sale that sounded like it could be okay. When we got there I was a little scared by the front door — complete with bathtub no-skid stickers on the door and a stunning “Beware of Cat” sign.

When we walked in, it smelled like people had been smoking in that house for about the last 40 years. There were ashtrays for sale … and one that had about 20 cigarette butts still in it. (For sale? Who knows.) There was an assortment of crusty junk scattered all over the living room and into the kitchen. It was also freezing-ass cold.

I noticed some steep stairs in one corner (covered with grungy-looking long shag carpet) and asked if there was more stuff upstairs, to which the seller nodded. Somewhat apprehensively we went up. Upstairs was a really weird scene. It was like they had cleaned up 90% of the former contents of the room, but then decided to leave just a few random piles of junk here and there. And when I say junk, I really mean junk.

This dresser gave me a bad vibe. Along with all the really great items you can see, there were photocopies of someone’s driver’s license, sitting on top of several pieces of unopened mail.

To be honest, there was almost a crime-scene vibe to the place, and I was starting to get a little creeped out. I bought nothing and loitered around outside while Meghan paid for for a couple of yellow spaghetti string glasses. I told her when she washed them it would probably turn out that they were really white.

My only purchase? A small white garbage can (unused) for $1. Not really a day for the record books, but hey. Yard sales are a crapshoot and you gotta hit a bunch of duds to get to the ones that make it all worthwhile.

Trunk photo? You gotta be kidding.

While I was in Iowa we took an afternoon and drove to Sioux Falls, South Dakota. Since I had never been there before we only went to thrift stores that we just happened by.

Since it was Halloween, some of the workers at the Goodwill had dressed up. One gentleman let me take this photo of him in his traditional Pow Wow outfit, with his Goodwill vest over it. He was a good sport.

Since I had never gone thrifting on Halloween before, I had no idea how many people go to thrift stores very late in the day to get costumes. It’s almost 5:00 p.m. and now you are looking for a costume?

The thrift stores in Sioux Falls are pretty good. I picked up a three-piece 50’s sweater dress, a skirt, and a few other items. The thought of having to mail items back home kept me pretty sane in my purchases, but Sioux Falls Thrift shops are worth a look if you find yourself here.

I have been putting off blogging about my Midwest vacation, it’s just too much to think about. Too many photos, too many scraps of paper with sales or thrift store notes scribbled on them. This was way bigger than Texas as far as the sheer volume of places that I went to.

I was going to try and blog in chronological order, but that started to overwhelm me. The solution (if you can call it that) is to just slowly tackle a state at a time.

So I’ll start with the Lakes area of Iowa – covering Spirit Lake, Okoboji, Spencer, Milford and Esterville. As far as I can tell there aren’t really any thrift stores in this area, with the exception of a crappy Goodwill in Spencer that was mostly filled with cast-offs from Walmart and Old Navy.

There are 27 different antique shops in this area and I was able to hit about half of those, some very overpriced. The Okoboji Antique Mall has higher prices than Ebay! This is Iowa, right? They did have this awesome Tidy Teddy parks sign that I thought was pretty great.

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One antique mall in downtown Spirit Lake (Red Door Antiques) had a fly swatter for sale – WTF?

They did have Bakelite-handled flatware for dirt cheap, so I guess that was an okay trade-off.

There seemed to be no real middle ground. Most places were either super high end …

… or super low end.

I purchased some vintage Fiestaware for 3 bucks a plate at a place called the 6th Street Emporium in Estherville that was far more large-scale thrift store than antique shop. They did have the largest selection of bridesmaids dresses and shoes that I have ever seen in one place.

Here is an insanely long list of antique stores in Iowa in case you are headed out that way for some reason.

My parents and sister went to a city-wide yard sale day somewhere in the California Bay Area last month. Yes, last month — even in California, I think scheduling your city-wide yard sale in October is pretty bold! However, they lucked out and the weather was great and they bought all sorts of odd stuff … and were inspired by our blog to take a picture of the junk in their trunk. (Well, really the “junk in the back of their station wagon”, but close enough.) How cute is that?

Nice photo-styling, mom & dad.

Meghan and I rode to the Bitch-N-Swap together and after making about five wrong turns trying to get to Leslie’s house, we finally made it there. We told her that she should have had signs up with arrows that just said “Bitch.” (I’m sure her suburban neighbors would’ve loved that.)

I knew that Leslie and some friends had spent a good part of the previous day setting things up, but I was still amazed at how organized everything was. It looked like her living room had been completely emptied out to make room for swap stuff. Everything was nearly arranged in sections, with handy bright pink signs indicating what type of stuff could be found there, like “Frederick’s of Hello Kittie” for lingerie, “Home Despot” for household items, “Isle of Man” for all things testosterone-ish, and more. Neither of us had remembered to bring our camera, but thankfully Leslie’s friend Giselle agreed to be pressed into service documenting the swap for us; all of these photos were taken by her. (Thanks again, Giselle!)

I thought it was very appropriate to see “How to Conquer Clutter” among the tons of books.

In the center of the room was an enormous mound of clothes, which always had at least four people digging through it and which somehow didn’t seem to get any smaller as the swap went on.

I pulled out a couple of t-shirts for my husband, and a couple of dresses and skirts which I later rejected and threw back into the pile. After making a couple of passes around the room’s perimeter (and a couple more digs through the clothing heap) I headed to the kitchen, where I enjoyed a fresh-brewed cup of “Hong Kong Milk Tea” and some really good cookies. There was also a “chill-out room” where exhausted swappers were camped out watching cheesy movies.

As Meghan and I took a load of stuff to our car we saw someone carrying in a painting which truly horrified us. Even scarier, it was a swap veteran: it’d come to a previous swap and been taken home by someone who intended to give it as a gift. Not surprisingly, the gift was rejected, and so back it came. Here is Leslie posing with this masterpiece.

I don’t think anyone grabbed it and I’m really not sure what its fate will be now … nor do I really want to know!

Thanks in part to the Forbidden Items List, the general quality level was pretty decent. I was tempted by a lot of items that were kinda cool, but which I just didn’t really need, like cocktail shakers, funky ashtrays, and quirky zines. Due to my amazing restraint I only ended up bringing a few items home: the aforementioned t-shirts; a pair of shoes which I thought looked like bowling shoes, and only later realized were indeed actual bowling shoes; one interesting-looking book (the title of which I’ve already forgotten); one back issue of Bitch magazine; one Halloween pumpkin candle-holder; and a few stickers and other little trinkets for my daughter. Meghan ended up with a couple of bags full of books, clothes, and other items, including what I think was her score of the day, a beat-up but quite stylish black and leopard vintage handbag.

Even though a lot of stuff was taken away, there was a scary amount of stuff left over. Here is just some of the unclaimed stuff that was bagged up and taken to a thrift store afterwards.

It’s been almost two weeks since the swap. Tragically, Leslie is still dealing with the leftover items. I think she deserves a Craptastic Medal of Honor for putting this crazy event together! I hope her sanity is still intact by the time everything is out of her house.