Yard Sale Bloodbath

After the last few weekends being pretty questionable I was tempted to flake on sales, especially with a drizzly forecast. However, someone posted a photo to our Facebook page with details about a fun-sounding moving sale. It started at 7 am, but we are not that hardcore, especially in winter, so we went around 9:00. All of the stuff was set up under a big tent. As expected, the seller was super nice and her items tended toward the wacky.

In addition to clothes and various household items there were also an assortment of “mystery item” grab bags!

The mystery theme extended into other areas, too …

Even the free box had its high points.

Meghan and I each bought a few things, and I decided to take a chance on a fifty-cent grab bag. After a quick ATM stop we headed off to the other sale on my radar, not too far away. Outside there were a bunch of tools and building materials stacked up–it looked very “guy.”

Not pictured: hundreds of records. We both started looking through then, and one of the guys running the sale came over and changed the sign from 50 cents each to 25 cents. Unfortunately this still wasn’t cheap enough to make me want to bring any of these records into my house. It was all crap you can find at any thrift store, and super crusty. Then I got to a box that seemed like something had spilled on it … I decided maybe it was better to take a look-but-don’t-touch approach to this sale.

Along with the vinyl there were plenty of 8-tracks.

And then there was this knife carrying case … I suppose there could be a normal reason for owning this, but it seemed a little ominous.

A couple of other rooms were also open, but there wasn’t much in them. Maybe that was for the best. I did find this lone figurine, which added to the whole “man cave gone wrong” vibe.

We left without buying a thing. Are you surprised? Then I realized I remembered that the listing I’d read was for a moving sale that had mentioned baby stuff, so I made the brilliant observation that there must be a different sale out there. I found the info and we hit that too, but it was a bust. We were eating breakfast before 10:30 AM.

Oh, and the “mystery item”? I think I got my fifty cents’ worth of entertainment.

We have mentioned this before, but some days end up having a theme. I have no idea how or why, but in the case of the weekend before last, it happened again. (Oh, yeah. I was unable to get off my lazy butt to blog in the last two weeks… yeah, it says a whole lot about me.) Karl drove all the way across town to hit these three sales with us. Poor guy.

The first sale was in a two-bedroom apartment about five minutes from my house. Jenny mentioned that her ad was full of exclamation points and “LOL”s, which didn’t seem like a good sign. The first thing we see is these leftovers from Halloween outside her front door. We should have listened, but NO …

Really it wasn’t that bad … if I wanted everything to be from the sale area at Ross Dress For Less.

I whispered something to Jenny about how all the clothing was in rainbow organization. Classy.

Speaking of classy, how about this poster? Why would you have this in your house?

In the same room we spotted this pillow. We decided it was time to high-tail it out of there.

After getting a baked good and working out which of the remaining two sales to hit first (no, really, three sales for the whole day) we settled on this sort of unremarkable estate sale. The house had a sauna, that was sort of cool.

In the basement we found these two really great paintings of the same woman.

Overall it was just sort of OK. They did have some cat stuff, as did the first sale–but not until we hit the Cat-Sale-Motherlode did it all sort of click.

Before we could get in, we had to wait for a very long time. We must have been about 40th in line when we arrived.

A guy walked out with some tools and Karl said “Hey, look at the hoe” — this is what we do to amuse ourselves.

Finally we got close to the porch. We entertained ourselves by digging through the free pile. It wasn’t good.

We had been waiting for so long that when I saw one of the guys working the sale come out, I just point blank said “Monty, I have been here for a very long time and I need to use the bathroom.” He said there was one downstairs I could use. Karl made some crack about there being a jar in the basement, then Monty chimed in about setting up a video camera. Nice! It turned out to be a perfectly normal bathroom.

When I got back up to the front door he let all of us come in and shop. Please note the really great sign about them “keeping the velvet coat.”

The house was very nice and there was a spectacular view, but this is when it turned into crazy cat stuff. EVERYWHERE. Everything from tiger-themed door stops (really a cloth-covered brick) …

… to cat jewelry and cat posters and cat mugs, even a couple of boxes of used cat toys.

There were also a TON of cat books.

If it was about cats … they had it.

My favorite discovery was “The Fur Person” (from 1957) by May Sarton.

I was so amazed by this book that I felt the need to look her up. I guess people love this writer. Go figure. This is not an invitation to comment about how much you love this book — go get a Good Reads account and post it there. Really…

They did have some non-cat-related items, like these wacky Spider Earrings.

Karl and I each purchased a few items here — those and a couple more things from the other estate sale probably aren’t really worth a trunk shot, but we took one anyway.