Yard Sale Bloodbath

I am not that used to going out to sales alone anymore, since I usually have someone with me. I don’t mind going, but figuring out the addresses while driving gets me a little turned around. The upside is I can leave when I want or not go at all or drive around in circles and no one cares.

This weekend was the Crown Hill Neighborhood sale. Some years it’s been really good, some years not so great.

As less old people live in our part of town and more families move in, they have less old/good stuff and for lack of a good way to put, more disposable goods. When I say disposable, I mean items that come into your home from Old Navy or the dollar store for a year and then end up at Goodwill.

The first good sale was a woman that honestly I can’t tell if she is a picker or collector, but I have been to her sale a few times. This time around she and her guy planned to move, so she was really unloading.

There were piles of clothing, and the book sellers had stacks going — this is what the books looked like after they left.

I picked up a few things for a whopping $6. She told me that if I came back on Sunday at 3:00, everything left over would be free. She hadn’t really finished unloading the entire garage, but I knew I could be there all day if I waited around.

The next street of sales I hit had this nice sign.

But once I turned, then I saw a ton of caution signs on their street about kids playing. I had a woman screaming at me to slow down, “KIDS ARE AT PLAY HERE!” First of all, I am going 5 miles an hour. Second, there aren’t any children currently playing on your street. Third, you are standing in the middle of the road and I am not going to hit you (I did think about it). After that I didn’t want to buy a fucking thing from this family or her neighbors. I am not trying to be a total jerk, but I could barely go a slow enough speed to have my car stalling … it wasn’t like I was flying along at even 20 miles an hour.

I was also getting a little miffed about the overall quality of the sales, plus that interaction about my driving bugged me enough that I just picked a new area to hit. Blue Ridge has a yearly sale at a different time, but it’s close enough, so I drove over and found this funny little sale.

Her sign was great and I picked up some really nice design magazines that I would never pay $7 for on the newsstand. She had some other nice items, but not really my style.

I thought I would just wander around and stopped at a sale where the woman was a lawyer who had just lost some weight and of course her old size is my current size. She had nice taste and the tags were still on most of her clothing. I picked up a few items, including a really nice $300 suit with the tags still on for $30. I rarely ever have to dress like that for work, but the suit is really pretty.

All these tutus at the next sale made me sad that Jenny wasn’t with me, since they seemed like something her daughter would love to have in her selection of dress-up clothing.

The next sale was at a huge ranch-style ’50s house. I remember buying records here many years ago. They had a nice display of tables with vintage dishes –- not that I’m allowed to buy dishes.

I stopped at another sale to looked at this 70s moped.

I was taking a photo of it for my husband. I had my hand on the seat and the man that we like to call “furniture guy” walked right past me and asked the price. Before the owner could say anything I said “Oh, do you mean the moped that I am currently looking at?! You mean this moped?” He became sheepish and skulked off.

I did call my husband and he almost purchased it, but couldn’t get the guy to come down from his $200 price for a moped with no title that hadn’t been running in over 15 years. I went to a few more unremarkable sales and ended up calling it quits around 11:30.

How do you get to the point where making owl art out of any possible material seems like a great idea?

Really, dried beans? Hmmm. How about pinecones?

These were at an estate sale we hit on Saturday. Along with many other questionable items.

There was more out back …

… including this terrifying pair of clowns.

A friend of mine asked if they were clown glory holes. There’s a phrase I wish I’d never heard.

This sale was (obviously) not much of a winner, but Meghan did pick up a great pile of vintage sewing patterns. We’d also both grabbed some clothes, but had to put them back when it turned out they weren’t part of the “$2 unless marked” section after all. The people running the sale had used the worst price stickers ever — apparently our items had all been priced, but the stickers drifted away. (I did notice a bunch of $10-and-up price stickers scattered around the floor and walls.) I ended up buying a furry fuchsia hat (which truly was $2) and a demented-looking contraption: the Decoregger.

It wasn’t a big deal not to find much here, because we had both already gone a little nuts at a moving sale — we hadn’t seen an ad for it but were lured in by their jaunty signs.

Yes, that is rain. Can we not talk about it? Seattle’s summer has been … challenging.

The sellers were a really nice couple who were moving to New York and had recently closed a home-decor type of store. They were selling a bunch of its groovy leftovers, at way-cheaper-than-retail (if still higher-than-your-average-moving-sale) prices.

Among the items: many rolls of unused wallpaper.

This wasn’t vintage stuff — it was newer rolls from schmancy design companies like Ferm Living.

I love this kind of stuff (even though I have no practical need for it) and I knew that if I really started picking stuff up it could get bad. I kept circling around to the boxes, starting to look, then walking away. Eventually I gave in and bought a few of the smaller rolls with patterns I really loved. Meghan bought a few as well, plus a bunch of other miscellaneous items. As we drove away she realized she sort of wanted another roll and did something I don’t think we’ve done before: drove back to the sale and asked if she could do an exchange! They took back the storage boxes she’d purchased and let her have another roll instead.

Most of the other sales we hit were pretty blah. The only thing worth mentioning was that we got boxed in by a truck while trying to drive away from one sale and Meghan was inspired to sing a song to its driver (not that he could hear us): an upbeat little ditty with the lyrics, “It’s all about you — other people don’t matter!” I’m sorry there’s no audio of that gem.

Then at our last sale of the day, what did we find but the counterpart to last week’s “World’s Greatest Wife” mug!

It would be great if somehow those two end up together, but I sure don’t want them in my house.

All in all, we didn’t buy much, but we were pretty happy with what we got.

Last Friday I saw an ad for something claiming to be a 75-family sale right near my house. I decided to swing by in the afternoon and it turned out to be a church rummage sale — really bad, but at least I got a picture of this mind-boggling mug.

That has got to be a contender for “worst art ever to appear on a commercially produced mug.” How does that even happen?

Saturday I headed out with Meghan and Karl for the first time in a few weeks. One of our first stop had this wagon full of records.

Karl dug a small pile out of there. Meghan made a couple of small purchases and as she was putting them in the car, noticed a vintage child-sized metal shopping cart priced at $5. She pretended to think about whether she really needed it, but I think it was love at first sight. She did mutter something about possibly receiving divorce papers once her husband saw it in the house.

We made a couple more stops and then pulled up to a sale with a bunch of great-looking vintage items. Meghan yelled, “I want those bowls!”

They would have been hers, except for their crazy price — I can’t remember what it was, but almost everything at this sale was expensive. The exception was a box of shot glasses marked at fifty cents each. Karl and I pulled a couple out and the guy made some comment about how we should see all the ones he wasn’t letting go. Then for some reason he told us about one of his favorites, a Mustang Ranch souvenir shot glass reading “The Customer Always Comes First,” which he claimed he wouldn’t let go of for his life. He told us he found it at an antique mall, and I accused him of lying about that.

As we continued onward we found some wacky holiday decor …

… and a whole mess of Santa hats that someone had decided would best be displayed in a tree.

Another sale had a lot of wacky stuff. Meghan found some post-it notes labeled with swear words which were pretty awesome, as well as some great vintage clothes. After talking with the seller she figured out she’d been to a previous sale at the same house seven or eight years ago, and scored a bunch of clothes there too. None of us bought these odd foot candleholders, though … or the accompanying, um, paraphernalia.

We saw some creative sign repurposing as we made the rounds.

Then there was a neighborhood sale that took forever to get to and turned out to be so-so. Driving away we saw their sign — it looked like the tiniest sign ever, but we realized the real sign must have been taped on and fallen off. I decided to continue what seems to be an occasional trend of altering yard sale signs, mostly because it cracked me up imagining that someone would drive by and think this sign was for real.

Not long after that, we drove past this.

I have seen yarn bombing before, but this is the first time I have seen a fire hydrant with a hat … we had to take a picture.

The day sort of started to go downhill. From interesting but ultimately undesirable free items …

… to the jankiest moving sale sign ever …

… to a tooled leather clock …

… to a life-sized Hobbit stand-up.

We took an extended snack break, then followed some Burma-Shave-esque signs down the street to a yard sale … which completely sucked.

We didn’t want to end on that note, so we veered over to one last sale, whose ad had been interestingly wacky. (Pair of moose-antler hats! Dinosaur-shaped cake pan!) They seemed pretty cleaned out by the time we got there. I’m not sure it really would have been all that better earlier, anyway. At least I spotted this painting — it looks more like a chortling space alien than the Dalai Lama.

By the end of the day, I had only purchased a few small items. Meghan and Karl had some interesting stuff in the trunk, but you can’t see much of it here. But get a load of that shopping cart! Can’t wait for that to be filled up with beer and wheeled around at some future barbecue.