Yard Sale Bloodbath

Friday morning = RAIN. I am not sure how almost every single Friday morning for the entire summer has turned rainy, but it’s sort of been making me crazy.

Two sales listed had been listed as estate sales. That’s great once you are in the house, but standing in the rain listening to people belly-ache is sort of a bummer.

So, I drove to one sale and the line was so long that I thought I would hit the other one about 30 blocks away. Major bust.

When I drove back to the other sale I was #65 in line. This isn’t my day.

This sale was listed as some crazy artists sale and the folks coming out kept saying stuff like “it’s crazy in there” or “so much stuff.” When I did make it to the porch, the sign said just about everything you would want to know. Or at least #5 did – EEEK!

The house was packed and it was good stuff, but what really struck me was the guy’s love affair with Elvis and Karate. Elvis trained in the ’70s in Memphis, TN. You have to assume that this and Bruce Lee had a huge impact on many people, but an adult man with Elvis posters … it’s not great, right?

There were tons of books about ninjas and tons of martial arts magazines.

He had a karate sign.

A black and while Bruce Lee painting (that I can only assume he painted).

And a poster of Mount St. Helens. Classy.

I hit one other sale on the way home — nothing too crazy. I loved these new old stock fences.

But the best was this sign letting you know how long someone lived in the house. Um, thanks!

A “museum of things”? Sounds like what we see every weekend … But it’s a real place that I was able to visit during a brief stay in Berlin. Intrigued by the brief write-up in Time Out (and knowing we’d be right in the neighborhood) I decided I had to check it out.

The museum mainly consisted of case after case of things … all kinds of things.

The first thing it made me think of was being in an antique mall … a very tidy, well-curated antique mall. (Without price tags, of course.)

The things were displayed in lined-up cases – there were probably at least fifty of them, each with a different, specific selection of items inside.

It was cool, but kept wondering how they decided what to include in the collection. I mean, it seemed to span every conceivable type and style of item. How did they possibly narrow it down, when more artifacts could presumably obtained at any moment from various thrift shops or flea markets (not to mention newer items still available in stores)? I mean, why these bars of soaps and not others? Why so many soaps, and not a corresponding number of shampoos or deodorants or combs (which were all represented, but in smaller quantities)?

My next thought was that it was sort of like if you went to an estate sale of someone with hoarding tendencies, then carefully cleaned, arranged and displayed all the items. Because it felt almost like that amount of rhyme or reason as far as what was included: a somewhat random selection from all the “things” in the world (or even Germany). I’m sure there’s more to it than that, but it was a mystery to me. For the most part, there was no information about the items on display to clue visitors in to the thinking behind the exhibits, aside from each case’s label which gave a brief description of what it contained. (This one said something like “yellow and black things”. Of course I still wondered how they chose these out of every possible yellow and black things.)

My husband said that it reminded him of going to the Hobby Hall at the Puyallup Fair, where people’s collections of various things are displayed (always running the gamut from lame to amazing), and I could kind of see that too.

Maybe I was just thinking about it all too much. Or maybe looking at that much stuff was giving me flashbacks to those huge antique malls that would take hours to really get through (but you know there’s something good somewhere, so you scour through as best you can before running out of steam). Eventually I decided to just enjoy the crazy ride … and then discovered one of the most amazing things there, and one of the very few items not enclosed in a case: this mind-blowing television, complete wiith stereo components in built-in slots. Whoa!

Here’s a great post I found about the museum that actually digs into more of its philosophy, structure, and design aspects … way better than I could manage, and worth a read (great photos, too). Though I was happy to see that the author stlil reached somewhat the same conclusion that I did:

… on a purely surface level it’s just the coolest, best-organized thrift store you have ever seen.

It was an interesting, if somewhat baffling, experience. I’m glad I went! And I do think that everyday things should be preserved and admired. That’s often the subcurrent in my brain when I find something cool or strange at a yard sale … but then I think, do I need to be the one to preserve this? Usually, the answer is no. So it’s kind of nice to see someone else taking up the cause … and sharing the bounty with anyone who happens to be in Berlin (with four euros and a little time to spare).

Between being out of town, and a number of Saturday social events, last weekend was my first time hitting sales in over a month! I was excited, especially with nice weather in the forecast and our friend Erica guest-starring. And there were tons of sales listed. I was choosy about which ones made it onto our list, only including ones that looked promising and were reasonably nearby (even if that meant passing up possible gems like the one that claimed “my boyfriend wants to cook you hotdogs at our garage sale” and the ever-scary “Going to Burning Man?”).

Deciding on our first stop was easy: there was a sale two blocks away from Meghan’s house. We got there a few minutes early, but they were pretty much set up.

They had all kinds of stuff … some good, some bad, and even a few things from the dreaded “no one wants to see that at a yard sale” category.

Meghan pounced on a Kitchen-Aid mixer ($15!) while I dug through the books. Meanwhile, they kept bringing out more stuff, so we were there for a while. Karl hemmed and hawed over this amazing light-up Rainier beer display before finally deciding to commit.

When all was said and done, we had enough crap in the car that we decided to drive back around the block and do a drop-off. That doesn’t often happen after a single sale.

Our next stop was something listed at a corner which has not quite a perma-sale, but a fairly frequent recurring sale of vintage furniture. I said if it was them, we’d just drive by. Instead, it turned out to be in the front yard of this law office.

I couldn’t really figure out why a law office would have that much crap, but maybe they were just letting the (mulleted!) sellers use their space. In any case, we left empty-handed.

Next was a sale listed as huge, but when we got there we hardly saw anything. “There’s more in back,” someone said. And there was: stuff spread over the entire back yard and deck. Unfortunately, it was all bad. Tidy and well organized, but bad.

Next was a sale that sounded vintage-y and wacky. They had boxes of odd books and magazines, a really strange assortment — electronic music mags from the ’70s, various foreign oddities, Circus and other rock titles, and more. I started to amass a huge pile … then I got real and narrowed it down to just a few choice scores. Meghan uncovered the most impressive items: a few really old issues of High Times, including the premiere issue from 1974.

We decided to check out a neighborhood sale, passing by this sad free pile on the way.

At the first sale, we immediately saw a rack of dresses with a sign that said “Special, $5.99 Plus Tax.” WTF? We asked the couple standing nearby if they were really charging tax at a yard sale, and they said no (without offering any other explanation). $5.99 still seemed like a weird price, but whatever. Aside from the dresses they had a typical spread of random kitchen and household items, plus some odd new stuff: a box with something like 75 brand-new toothbrushes, and a bunch of still-sealed packs of band-aids. Between that and the tax thing, we figured they might have owned a store at some point. Meghan asked if this was the case. The guy rolled his eyes and said, “No, her hobby is shopping.”

On the way out I wanted to take a picture of the “$5.99 Plus Tax” sign … but they had amended it! For some reason this made me laugh even more.

The neighborhood sales seemed pretty bad, but there was one I wanted to hit that had been listed as “beach shack estate sale” — the house wasn’t actually on the beach, so I wasn’t sure what was up with that, but something about it sounded good. Sadly, it wasn’t, and on that note we decided to give up on that neighborhood and move to a new area.

After a few uneventful stops, we came across this. Uh, what?

That didn’t exactly bode well, but we went in. I quickly realized this was the sale which had mentioned “dozens of vintage clocks.”

One of the sellers was sprawled upon a couch, possibly to emphasize the claims made on their sign.

It was really mostly crap, and their “wacky” labeling didn’t help much.

Erica attempted to buy one of the $5 clocks, but when they wouldn’t take $4 she decided to pass.

Next was a fundraiser sale where one of the sellers was a ten year old girl wearing the top half of a bee costume and the bottom half of a pig costume. (It was a good look.) It seemed like they might have some good stuff, and I started to dig in a box when a woman came up and said, “Oh, that’s my box.” I stopped looking, and then she said “It’s a great deal!” So, I figured she’d meant it was her box of stuff she was selling, and she wanted me to look after all … but when I bent back down she repeated, “That’s my box.” I was too annoyed after that to look around much more, but everyone else found some good stuff.

By then it was getting close to quitting time, so we started to make our way back home, hitting just a few more on the way. One of them had junk strewn around haphazardly in the back yard, and then a very organized (but odd) display in the basement.

One of the sellers walked over right as I was taking that picture, and made a comment about how I must be getting display ideas for MY yard sale. I just nodded my head.

I went back out to the back yard and browsed around with Karl and Erica, waiting for Meghan to come out of the basement and joking around about various oddball items. Then I got a text message: “What are you 3 doing? That sale is bad.” She was already out at the car, wondering what was taking us so long.

And with that, we were done!

This lady does.

Yes, it’s insane …

Supposedly she collected for many years and wrote down every single thing she purchased. She collected everything. Not really sure if you can see all the items under plastic (that weren’t for sale), but you get the idea.

Pretty intense for a quick Friday sale stop!

Okay. Two weeks ago (yes. really, two weeks ago) I hit some sales with Karl and one of my girlfriends and favorite derby skaters, Maliboozer Barbie, who has been threatening to come to sales for the past year.

The first sale we hit was a horrible rummage sale, but I spied this framed Goldberg print. I really like the way they did their signs: large red dot = 50 cents.

Man, if I wanted furniture our next sale would have been great. But there’s that pesky fact that I am not allowed to bring home any more large objects. They had tons of stuff and they were already making plans to get drunk that day … my kind of sale.

One of the sale we hit was listed as a carport sale with all of grandpa’s stuff. Karl purchased a lot, but I was just really excited to find this simply awful 1980 Mechanix Illustrated with a cover story about “the cars that are driving OPEC crazy.”

At this point it seemed like a good time to get the heck out of Ballard, but Karl isn’t the navigator that Jenny is and we ended up taking some twists and turns winding up at a sale described as “cream of the crop sale.” This super hippie painted sign really doesn’t make me think about an amazing sale.

The only interesting thing was a really nice Gottlieb scuba pinball machine (that they wanted $500 for and all the rubber parts needed to be replaced).

After getting turned around a few more times we hit a huge sale that wasn’t very good, but how could we miss it with their “huge sail”?

It was for some sailing club and they had been giving cards good for free lessons, which all seemed a little strange.

The last sale was really weird, since the woman had my old cooler that I sold years ago.

After talking to her and working out that it was the same cooler that I’d sold in our basement sale (you can see it in the fourth photo down), I re-purchased it from her for $5. Then Karl talked her into bringing out all her LPs from the ’80s and bought a ton.

Sadly, with Jenny out of town I forgot to take a trunk photo, but it was a pretty good day.

O.K., so we haven’t blogged for almost three weeks in the middle of summer. Well, I am a married woman now and Jenny took off mere moments after the wedding to head off to Europe. So, now we are catching up on a back-log of blog posts. Anyone that knows me know that I hate blogging two weeks after the fact, but here we go.

Karl was unable to get to my house until almost 9, so I just took off on my own and hit this very strange sale with revolutionary books and this huge free pile.

I really love the idea of a yard sale sign that tells you to smile.

Honestly the whole day was already looking bad from our lists and we hadn’t even started. And that kept on going for the whole day. We hit one crappy sale …

… after another crappy sale.

Karl and I both belly-ached about how badly it was going for most of the day. Then we hit an area that had this huge rock. I mean it’s HUGE. You can tell how gigantic it is, no?

As we walk to the sale we see the Snoopy Psychiatric Advice tent.

Karl gave the kid 10 cents and asked if he should go to the gym or go play tennis. The answer? “Whatever you want to do.” Even his parents laughed at this bogus advice.

Then we randomly hit an estate sale that had what I can only describe as the scariest crawl space filled with stuff.

It was probably about 350 square feet, and jam packed. There was other stuff in the house too (like the portrait below) but that crawl space was too much.

Our very last sale had this amazing sign with the barefoot bandit.

We worked out right away that it was a sale we’d hit last year (from the photo at the top of this post). The sign made up for the sale being just “eh”.

Not the best day ever, but we did somehow manage to pick up a few things.