Yard Sale Bloodbath

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 …