Last week my mom came for her yearly Seattle Garage sale visit, sadly without my aunt in tow this time … with the two of them together the hijinks are at a much higher level. My mom had a plan: “to buy a ton of stuff.” Um, okay.
One of our very first sales wasn’t open at 9:00 and we vowed to try to get back to it, since it looked like it could be good. It was a woman clearing out her whole house (more on her later).
As we drove away from her house, we happened to drive right past a house as they started setting up. Sure the sale doesn’t look that great, but she was selling all of her folks’ glasses and dishware that had been in boxes for years. My mom purchased a huge box of stuff, I found a really nice green and blue vintage Blendo cocktail set.
Her daughter was selling snacks and made this pretty great sign.
At one of our next sales we saw this (and one other) vintage doll house.
Of course my mom needed to inform the ladies running the sale about how my grandfather made me a doll house that I pushed against the heater in our house in 1976 and it almost burnt our whole house down.
Now, I realize when folks sell an entire box of one color bandanas that they don’t probably know anything about “hanky code”. But that doesn’t make it any less funny to me.
By about 9:30 we already had to do our first unloading of the car! We did hit a ton more sales over the course of the next 4 hours. Including a couple of hipster sales.
During this time my mom and I had a conversation about her carrying around her money in a banking envelope. This had come up a few years ago and I even purchased a nice wallet for her, which she informed me she is using, but it’s in her car. My worry was that she would leave her envelope of cash at a sale or a store.
We finally made it back to the sale that we tried to hit early on. She had this cool King Tut mural.
I picked up a ton of vintage games for super cheap. The woman was really nice and she was selling everything to move to a warmer climate.
We both picked up some great stuff at this sale and left for one last stop. Starting out, the stairs were scary.
The house itself was filled with stuff.
Nothing that I really needed, but my mom cleaned up buying all of her cut crystal stemware.
After getting back to my house, my mom realized she had left an envelope with $400 at the sale where we picked up the games. WTF MOM?!?!
We drove back to the sale just talking about how the money would definitely be gone and you know what? The woman had found it and returned all of the cash! Wow! My mom was very lucky.
And here’s one of our two full trunks!
Wow! Your Mom did get lucky with that money! Looks like a better than average day. Good for y’all! I’m very intrigued by those boxes and boxes of slides and just love your Mom’s dollhouse story.
You really lucked out with all those games! I remember playing each one of them and the spirograph was one of my favorites!
Is that a knitting bag/stand with bark cloth in your trunk shot?! Love that. And yes, your mom was very lucky. She needs one of those trucker wallets with the chain.
Melissa,
Yes. My mom picked that up. nice barkcloth.
glad to hear your mom got her money back – there ARE some honest people in the world.. I actually left my very expensive wallet, complete with a dozen credit cards and around close to $100 in cash in the back of a cab in NEW YORK CITY – if you can imagine that. And it was returned to me, some young guy from Brooklyn found it. He spent some of the money, since he was out partying that particular night, and told me sheepishly on the phone when we were arranging the return of the wallet – but that was fine. I let him have the cash.
There was some study about 15 years ago of cities you are most likely to get your wallet back with all the cash inside and Seattle was number one.