Yard Sale Bloodbath

Jenny wasn’t going to go to sales at all this week and I was sort of trying to twist her arm a bit about just going for a couple of hours … I suspect she was committed to not going until she got an email from an old work friend that was having a sale in Magnolia. The main plan was to go there and just sort of come back to Ballard, but in the morning Jenny said there were a few early morning sales before her sale. Little did we know that we should have been at her friend’s sale extra early — she’d told Jenny it started at 9, but later I realized her ad even said “early birds are fine, if you help me unpack”.

We hit a couple of boring sales and to be 100% honest, I really don’t remember anything about them. Sorry.

Jenny’s friend’s sale turned out to be GREAT!

FINALLY! It’s going to be a great weekend for a yard sale! If you’ve been to one of our sales, you know we only have quality stuff. We are foodies, art collectors, designer clothes lovers AND we are pairing up with my sister, father and other random folks to offer you a great place to come pick.

Jenny was smart enough to take some photos while I sort of took a full on dive into so much stuff that if I would have thought for half a second, I would probably have seen some reason to tone it down.

There was a woman that had hit the sale before us that had a huge pile, but there was tons of stuff that hadn’t even been opened. I don’t need to go into how much I purchased, but it was a whopping $170 by the time I was done and between that and the $30 or so Jenny spent, the trunk was pretty full.

Right next door was a Jr. Roller Derby fundraiser. When I asked it was for Seattle Derby Brats I was corrected that it was for junior banked track derby. Oh, roller derby –- how can a person even keep track of how much derby there is?!?!

They did have this sweet-ass rave jacket.

EEEK! One of the sellers made a comment about handing out a free glow stick to whoever purchased it.

Jenny mentioned a book sale and it turned out to be at this large modern home.

The second we walked in the door the guy having the sale was sort of yelling at his mom after some books had been knocked over. He was sort of being a dick, but caught himself and realized he was getting upset with his mom during a yard sale in what I can only guess is her house.

Not sure why you would need a family planning and a menopause book, but whatever…

We were about to head back to Ballard but then I saw a sign that I just felt the need to follow. And we found this.

Yeah. It really is the largest cat scratching post thing you have ever seen. It was $100 (down from the retail of $400) and even if I had a cat or two I would never want that thing in my house. When I mentioned it being huge the owner said, “Yeah, they were living large.”

Next we hit a large fundraising sale that was really, really huge.

It looked like something great could be found, but not on your life.

At this point my car started to act up the same last week (no worries, it’s in the shop as we speak). So what do we do? Keep going to sales and hope that it keeps starting? Well, yeah.

The next sale had a couple of boxes of records and Jenny was making some smart-ass remarks about the BeeGees. I had to stop and laugh about this Andy Gibb LP.

To be honest I just remember him:

1. Doing the song “Shadow Dancing”
2. Dating Victoria Principal
3. Doing too much coke and being broke and then dropping dead at 30.

I did find this great photo while doing a google search.

At the next sale they had a few interesting items. This amazing (but musty and overpriced) sort of studded suit …

… some really bad records …

… and a hookah!

Then my car really didn’t want to start. We mostly laughed, since it was only five blocks to my house and we could walk if we had to. But then after five minutes it started right up. What the hell???

Our last sale turned out to be sock guy’s sale. He said he almost put that in his ad, so that we would know it was him.

No socks this time around, but I picked up a nice leather jacket and a pair of boots. And I left the car running the whole time!!!

It was pretty nice out last Saturday, and there were tons of sales listed! Naturally our first stop had to be the neighborhood sale that I had steered Meghan towards last time, not realizing that it was happening THIS weekend. Sure enough, this time it was ON.

The first sale we hit looked really promising. I was dismayed to see a guy who’d already pulled out a huge stack of books. Did he snag all the good stuff?

I glanced at his pile and was kind of relieved to find nothing I wanted in there. I dug through the rest, and it seemed like there would be something, but yet … nothing tempted me. However, Meghan headed to the upper level and grabbed about six or seven hardcover design books for about a buck each. Nice! We kept meandering through the neighborhood.

Let me state that it was freakishly windy. At this sale a clothes rack almost blew over and knocked me down. Things were flying off the tables!

After hitting everything in that neighborhood, we moved on to a few sales nearby. The ad for this one had seemed promising, mentioning vintage items. They definitely had a lot of stuff.

Smaller items were set out in bins that were a complete mix of items. Vintage sectioned plate? Kewpie doll? White plastic football? Red Skelton VHS tapes?

The next bin was even more baffling: a stack of 8-track tapes labeled “parts only.”

While I was pondering whether there was some market for 8-track parts that I had been unaware of, Meghan pointed out this wacky item that looked like a burlap sack with a fluffy cat’s tail poking out of it. “Smack it on the table!” the seller called to us. We did so … and decided it was video time.

Neither of us brought that home, but Meghan grabbed some vintage dinerware with a Shriner motif. (Hey, that rhymes! Shriner-diner!)

We had two choices of where to go next. A cluster of sales in another neighborhood, or two sales that were closer, but in the opposite direction. We decided to hit the two sales, making our first stop at what was billed as a 7-room estate sale.

They had a list of rules posted prominently at the door, with a kid selling treats nearby. (I purchased a donut-hole-on-a-stick for a quarter.)

Once inside, the first thing we saw was what Meghan referred to as the “Instant Bauer collection.” If you wanted to spend some money, that is.

There was a decent amount of stuff there. Some of it was kind of classy and antique-y …

… and some of it was not.

We both felt like there might be some good clothes somewhere in the closet, but it was a bust.

And this huge vintage poster was awesome, but $1100? Who’s going to walk into a sale and drop that?

The second sale on this street had a ton of new clothes, some with tags still on. Most of it was sportswear, or at least sporty.

By this time the wind was really picking up. After Meghan asked the price of a jacket and it was $35, I decided to go wait in the car, thinking to myself that $35 is not an acceptable answer when asking the price of a jacket at a yard sale … only to have Meghan come over a few minutes later asking to borrow some cash. She was purchasing the jacket, which turned out to be some super high end thing I’d never heard of, and a pair of compression pants, which is also something I’ve never heard of but apparently they are really expensive.

Meghan was talking excitedly about her purchases as she got back into the car and tried to start it up … only to have it do nothing. Which had happened to us last time we were making the rounds! Apparently, her car doesn’t always feel like starting up, but only when we are going to yard sales; it had been fine all week. After several attempts and curse words, the car finally managed to start, and off we went. We spotted a sign for a sale in what we usually refer to as “No-Sidewalk-Land” (or occasionally just “scary”) but for some reason, we decided to go. Little did we realize that we were headed to a sale across from a cemetery. Yes, the cemetery that we accidentally drove into while hitting sales a couple years back. Let’s revisit that magic moment:

On the way to the next sale we had something happen that I can seriously tell you has never happened before: I accidentally drove into a cemetery. I know what you are thinking — “HOW???” This cemetery is very small and older, so there are no huge signs out front. It also has a small street that runs along one side, so when I whipped into the cemetery I thought I was on that street. Both of started cracking up at how absurd this was. I do some pretty crazy driving on occasion, but this took the cake.

This time we managed not to drive into the cemetery, but when we saw the actual sale … we were still frightened.

We decided we had to venture in, just for blogging purposes. But since it wasn’t really a place you’d want to be stuck if the car really crapped out, we did so while leaving the car running. Classy, right?

This sale … I’m not sure I can convey how strange it really was. We walked through a gate, alongside that tarp-covered trailer, between tables laid out with all manner of items that seemed to have spent several decades boxed up in a damp garage. There were cats lying around on the astroturf-like material that covered the walkway. I sort of felt like I didn’t want to touch anything and there was definitely a bit of meth-head vibe going on. Just when I was getting ready to turn around and leave, Meghan nudged me. “Did you see that leg?”

What? A leg? Yes, a prosthetic leg, propped up on a table. It looked like it had seen better days. Meghan asked about it and the woman said, “That’s my daughter’s old leg! She outgrew it.” The daughter, who was sitting behind a cashbox, nodded at us. The woman added that ten percent of all sales would be used to buy her new shoes.

We pretended to look around a bit more and I knew Meghan was going through the same thought process that I was: trying to figure out how to take a picture without it being too strange, but eventually accepting the fact that there was no way and regretfully giving up. On the way out I spotted some colored paper signs, cut in little starburst shapes and taped up to the trailer like little advertisements and notices. Again, I could not manage a picture, but the ones that I remember said: “Used Broken Computers — ASK!” “10% of all proceeds used for orthopedic shoes!” and finally “SMILE, YOU’RE ON CAMERA!!!”

We jumped into the still-running car and sped away from that insanity. Meghan made a comment about how she needed some Purell, and I was confused since I didn’t think she had touched anything there, either … until she clarified that what she wanted was Purell for her soul.

We spotted a sign for a “G Sale” — I always find this entertaining.

When we got there, they’d boiled it down to one letter. NO MESSING AROUND.

We didn’t buy anything, and this being closer to home (AND NOT ACROSS FROM A FREAKIN’ CEMETERY) Meghan had actually turned her car off … when it again failed to start until six or seven tries in, we detoured back to Meghan’s house and switched to my car. Meghan is not a fan of reading while driving (and I’m not sure she could really decipher the handwriting on my scrawled list) so I let her drive. Our next stop Meghan immediately recognized as the house where, at a sale long ago, a kid had done card tricks for us.

Thanks to the magic of having blogged for so long, I can tell you that this was nearly five years ago (and that we’d been at yet another sale there before that).

Our next stop was a house where I’d been to a sale years before and picked up a working ’70s Technics turntable for $5. Unfortunately, there was nothing I wanted to buy this time around, but there was a grade-school boy who shouted, “Card tricks! Twenty-five cents!” I made Karl give him a quarter and he proceeded to do a very long trick in which he repeatedly asked, “Um … is this your card?” We felt bad that he seemed to be screwing it up, but it turned out to be an elaborate setup for a grand finale where the right card was revealed.

The kid was nowhere in sight (probably a surly teen by now) but Meghan mentioned this to the guy having the sale, who didn’t seem to remember the particular incident but said he knew who the kid must have been. Just as we were about to leave empty-handed, Meghan spotted this odd but sort of cool brown ceramic thing — like a square plank with a grid pattern. It was marked “Carmel Kiln Company” and the seller said he didn’t know what it was for, but his mother used to have it hanging on the wall. She decided to purchase it and by the time she got in the car I’d searched on my phone and discovered that it was for meant for baking bread on, the squares meant for measuring out rolls. Who knew?

We headed across town to a basement sale. This was in a building I’ve driven past many times, which is partially covered with an aquatic animal mural. I had never been inside, or planned to, but I guess it was my lucky day.

The seller had thoughtfully provided entertainment by means of a TV that was playing West Side Story. She told us that some earlier shoppers had hung out watching it for a while.

I spotted this item, which I had never before imagined existed … the Mr. Potato Head Massager.

Again, we left empty-handed. The day had started off so promising! Had the leg sale jinxed us? Or was it switching cars? Who knows, but we determinedly headed to the final sale on our list, another estate sale. The first thing I saw was an odd fake metal dog thing that plugged in … I couldn’t figure out what it actually did when you plugged it. There was a small area that might have been a light, but the people running the sale said they’d tried it and whatever it used to do, it didn’t do any more. Oh well. Meghan was laughing about this calendar, where the days and year had been altered in order to count down to the sale weekend.

Then we spotted these great Halloween masks! We agreed that they were cool, but not ten-dollars-cool (just take-a-picture cool).

These guys were also take-a-picture-cool, or maybe that should just be take-a-picture-weird.

I spotted the second oval-framed portrait of the day — this one wasn’t for sale.

We meandered through the house and all of a sudden were led into a blue-shag-carpeted, metallic-wallpapered nook, complete with bunny cut-out — it felt a bit David Lynchian.

On the other side of this was a bedroom which contained a selection of terrible clothes. We dubbed this “Grandma’s ’80s Closet.”

Many of them still had tags, or were wrapped in plastic. (See? David Lynch! Okay, that’s a stretch.)

What is “Haband!”? Does that mean “Unwanted Sweater!” in some foreign language?

Finally, we entered … the doll room.

I think that mirrored wall just adds to the insanity. Doll overload! Along with some stuffed animals and … hey, what’s this?

It looks like a little stuffed flasher guy, right? Dare I look and see what he’s packing under that trenchcoat? Um, you know it …

While I appreciated how awesomely demented this thing is, even more so after reading the label and discovering his name is “Mr. Flashmore Jr.”, I decided against actually bringing him home.

In the end, it wasn’t the most bountiful day, but it wasn’t bad.

Jenny and I had sort of hemmed and hawed about if we would even hit sales, since it’s been raining here. Yes, it’s been nice on a random Tuesday afternoon, but that doesn’t make a person want to drag out their belongings at 7:30 AM on a Saturday morning. In the end we thought about maybe hitting sales for a couple of hours and then knock off early.

In looking at the sales on Craigslist one jumped out right away – it’s 4/20 dudes!

Dear Seattle,
Three young men once moved into a lodge at the top of a hillock. A dog as well, Luke was the name. They loved mountains, water, and the open road. Time passed, and many things were acquired. Everything but the dog must go.
Two corner sectional couches, one 60′s vintage
Complete snowboard, bootz
Complete Double up wakeboard
Oak hutch
Vintage t shits and clothes
Boomerangs
Shoes
Dr. Suess looking house plants
Handmade wall hanging art…

I also spotted a listing posted Friday night for an all night long sale. Reason for sale: Eviction on Saturday at 7:30 a.m. Gulp!

I sent those to Jenny, more as a joke than anything else. Usually, I drive and Jenny puts together the list of sales. And that usually works out great, but this time, Jenny sent us to a 9-house block sale that wasn’t actually happening until next week. Jenny was telling me that she was sorry, and also that since that wasn’t happening it didn’t leave us very many sales. Oddly enough I had driven by a few signs on my way to the bank earlier, so we decided to check those out.

At our first sale, Jenny immediately pointed out this thing.

WHAT IS IT? A bank? A cookie jar? Creepy nipple raccoon figure? Jenny knocked over a bunch of plastic margarita glasses in the process of us trying to figure it out.

The rest of the sale was sort of meh. They did have this spiffy homemade lampshade.

The next sale was in an enormous garage and I thought it was going to be good – mostly based on the fact that I had been to another sale here about five years ago that was great. In the end I think I purchased a book for my husband.

I do like the tack board/tool hanging board used for the sign.

The next sale Jenny kept calling the “TJ’s sale” and of course all I could think is “Trader Joe’s is having a sale?” Instead it was a sale for an outdoorsy couple taking off cruising in our boat and needing to sell all of their stuff.

She had this cool shoe box from 1892.

I purchased that, and also a newer -40 REI sleeping bag. I looked it up later and found that it retailed for $230. It’s at the dry cleaners as we speak.

While on the way to another sale, and really starting to wind-down already, we saw this sale.

OK, is it even a sale? Not sure. No sign and it looks more like 3 dudes standing around chatting, in fact we never even got out of the car. I mostly just squealed at Jenny to get a photo of the back of the truck!

Right? Maybe you can’t see the 3 ammo bags sitting on the truck bed, but I think you get the idea.

When we pulled around the corner to hit the next sale on the list, I realized that I had hit this sale on my way home from work on Friday and it was horrible. I had forgotten to tell Jenny about it until that point.

Is this day really going to suck this badly? We debated just going home. Then we spotted a “4/20 Gypsy Moving Sale” sign for a sale on Cleopatra, a street that is only 3 blocks long.

The sale was large, but sort of over priced — a woman quoted me some crazy stuff about a pair of Paige jeans going for over $200 new. Is your sale Nordstrom? No, it’s not.

In honor of it being Record Store Day, they had records – anyone want to do the Macarena? It was in there.

Continuing with the Record Store Day theme: this t-shirt.

We also saw this entire library of Ayn Rand books! EEEK!

Jenny picked up a sweater and the box set of The Wire and I bought a Fast Times at Ridgemont High t-shirt. At that point we decided to just get breakfast and call it a day.

Meghan and I had gone back and forth a bit about whether we’d try and hit sales last weekend. There wasn’t much listed, but when we found out that local restaurant Mae’s was closing down and having a sale, we thought we’d have to check it out. Neither of us were in the market for cow-themed kitsch, but we figured there might be other good stuff and at the very least it would be blog-worthy. It didn’t start until 10 a.m., so I put together a sparse list of other sales and we headed out around 9.

On the way to our first sale Meghan wistfully recalled a sale we’d hit years ago (well before starting this blog in 2007) where she’d purchased some incredible jewelry for dirt cheap. Different place, but same block. This time the street was covered with cherry blossoms. It looked like a pink snowstorm had hit it.

It definitely added a picturesque element to the sale.

Each of us picked up a book or two and I bought little ceramic animal figurines and a cool pitcher. Meghan had to wait for me to finish taking some art shots of the street.

Next we headed to sale that was scarily close to last week’s perma-estate-sale, but was at a different address. However, it wasn’t happening. We knew we were at the right address because we saw Furniture Guy standing outside, forlornly scratching his head. I considered rolling down the window and screaming that we were off to buy ALL THE FURNITURE, but my better judgement won out.

We headed off to a moving sale.

When we walked up the stairs and opened the front door, we found ourselves face to face with this.

Why? I mean … why? We were mystified (but very entertained).

The sale was in the living room and Meghan picked up some really great books. I poked around a bit but didn’t find anything.

We had a little time to kill before heading to Mae’s, so when we spotted a sign for a sale nearby we went over to it. Once we were there I realized it was a sale that I had purposely left off my list because it seemed to focus on hot wheels and toys. Doh! We left quick and went over to Mae’s.

We still had about ten minutes so we passed the time taking pictures and laughing at the sign. 100s – no, 1000s of items!

We had no doubt this was true, judging from just what we could see in the windows.

While waiting, Meghan also showed me a picture she’d taken of Mae’s proprietor in her Halloween costume — aside from the restaurant, she is the hilarious host of a Senior Center bingo night that we hit on a regular basis. Can you tell what her costume is?

Well, of course — she’s a one night stand. How awesome is that?

The doors opened and we started to look around. Things were spread over all the tables in all the rooms.

There was a little of this, a little of that …

… and a LOT of salt and pepper shakers.

There were also dogs playing poker.

And more dogs playing poker.

And some dogs playing pool.

Not to mention a bunch of poodles.

It took us a while to get through some of the rooms. This one with the giant mouth had a ton of stuff in it.

And then we got to the cow room.

Everything in there was cows. Even the mural across one whole wall.

I’m pleased to report that we left all the cows behind.

I did, however, succumb to the lure of a $2 Last paint-by-number Last Supper and a plastic two-headed dragon. Meghan purchased what she refers to as a “glasses dog” — a ceramic doggie head to rest your glasses on! (Definitely one of the most genius inventions of all time.)

And then we had one more stop: an estate sale. It had already been going for a day, but what the hell — beggars can’t be choosers when hitting sales in April.

Light-up Christmas decorations greeted us as we walked in.

This sale had been described as “girly” and they even offered a discount if you came wearing a tiara. Neither Meghan nor I took them up on this.

It looked like the woman had been a flight attendant and possibly also had a pilot husband — not sure, but there were a lot of airplane-related items around.

There were also a lot of purses, clothes, and beauty products.

And a whole mess of beanie babies … this was just a fraction.

We also found E.T.!

I am glad that Meghan had the presence of mind to take a picture of this amazing portrait — the woman of the house?

The more I look at it the more I love it. Especially those hands. (Hand?) I think it’s probably one of those pictures where the eyes follow you around the room. It wasn’t the only oddball painting around. Some of them seemed to have a political bent. This one was titled “Dr. Obama.”

I kept thinking maybe I’d find something, but most of the stuff was either not my style or just baffling.

Finally I did find something that was baffling in a way that made me want to spend fifty cents and take it home.

Meghan picked up a couple of wooden tokens that appeared to be whorehouse souvenirs, a cookbook, and a few other things. And that was it for our day!

Well, hello! Did you miss us? We always slow down in the wintertime, but this has definitely been our longest hiatus since starting the blog. So by this weekend, we were delighted to find there were actually some promising sales listed. Off we went!

One sale on my list didn’t seem to be happening, and the next should have been a driveby (though we did make the mistake of getting out and looking). The third one was an indoor moving sale. The listing sounded good, but I wasn’t too encouraged by this box on the porch.

Inside, one room was devoted to women’s clothes.

Everything was pretty tiny and leaned toward the trashy and/or spooky.

Also spooky? Shelves full of Halloween decor.

I think these clowns count as spooky too, or at least creepy.

I grabbed a book, but wasn’t finding much. Although I was sort of enamored by this Christmas tree art made from bits of vintage jewelry.

Meanwhile, Meghan had grabbed a pile of records — after first nearly getting into an altercation with some guy after she grabbed what turned out to be his records, even though he was nowhere near them at the time. She also snagged a blue Le Creuset dutch oven for two dollars (!!) Then she pointed out these portraits hanging up near the ceiling.

I was personally more taken with the Marijuana/Marlboro Man.

When we were almost ready to leave, Meghan showed me a black plastic bangle with white letters reading “Shaken Not Stirred Vodka Martini.” She wasn’t planning to buy it, but ended up throwing it into her pile. It promptly found a home on her gear shift.

We had another sale on our list: an estate sale at a former church, which had been the residence of two artists for many years. Both of us had been in this place a few times–they would rent out the upper area for events and such, and we also went to the open house when the building went up for sale. By the time we got there it was around 11:30 and the sale had opened at 10 … but there was still a line way down the block! It was way too cold to wait in that so we decided to come back later. We took a quick trunk pic showing the purchases from the first sale, and went home.

About an hour later we headed to the sale at the church, which by now had no line.

Can you see that crow window? It’s super cool — here’s a shot from inside.

We walked inside, up a staircase lined with bowling balls.

There were tons of shoppers milling about inside.

Here’s a close-up of that awesome Revival Meeting sign.

There were lots of other vestiges of the building’s former use. Like pews — some of which had globes sitting in them.

But there were some decidedly non-churchy fixtures, too.

One of the former residents had been an artist, working mainly with beads from what I imagine. There were definitely a lot of those around — this is just a small portion.

And there were all kinds of other oddities around.

As I was perusing the goods I heard Meghan call from the back room, “I’m going to buy some of these teeth …”

These were less freaky than the last time we found teeth at a sale, but still pretty strange. She selected a set that appealed to her and we looked around some more. Most of this room was dedicated to various odd objects made of glass.

We each ended up grabbing a small glass piece or two. Then right as we were getting ready to wrap it up we realized the downstairs was also open! We were running out of time but made a quick look. It too was filled with strange items.

One thing that was not present was an interesting glass panel in the shower. Thankfully, Meghan had snapped a picture of it when we were in the building for the open house. I guess whoever purchased the place didn’t want to keep this in the shower. I can’t imagine why.

We followed the sign back upstairs …

… and got in line.

I walked away for a few minutes to look at something and heard Meghan yell, “Oh my god! Jenny, come look at what this lady is holding!” I could not have possibly imagined how awesome it would turn out to be.

The Wonder Douche! (You thought it was going to be some annoying shopper, didn’t you?) Nothing was inside — just the box, which was from 1904. I was tempted to purchase it, but the price was too high. I thought about coming back on Monday when prices would be reduced, and seeing if it was still around — there were also a ton of other cool-but-completely-unnecessary items that I might have considered if the prices were just a tad lower. But as it turned out, I wasn’t able to make it. Which honestly is probably just as well. We each bought a few items and all in all, felt it was a good way to kick off a new year of saling!

It’s been ages since we’ve had a guest star come along! With Meghan out of town, my Portland pal Bonnie Ditlevsen came along for the ride. I warned her that October didn’t promise a whole lot in the way of sales, but she was still excited to have the Yard Sale Bloodbath experience, and kindly offered to write up the day’s report! Take it away, Bonnie …

The fall rainy season finally hit the Pacific Northwest, ending our unbelievable streak of heat-infused summer drought. Seattle somehow seemed like its old self as we got into Jenny’s car to check out some sales, both regular and estate.

First off, there was a fundraiser yard sale benefitting a preschool. Note the Seattle-savvy tarps and canopies!

As we imagined, there were all kinds of ex-baby and toddler items, pint-sized wooden furnishings, and this bevvy of books in a tub indicating what happens to many women when they breed: The Expectant Father and the ever-scary What Your Doctor May Not Tell You About Children’s Vaccinations followed by Danielle Steel, Mary Higgins Clark and Patricia Cornwell books (all now passé due to the fervor over Fifty Shades of Grey, I’m certain). These were sharing plastic-tub space with old Baby Einstein DVDs, Mom and Baby Fitness, and The Art of Aromatherapy. And alongside those, a couple of titles that gave me pause: Heart Full of Lies and If I’d Killed Him When I Met Him…. Slit my wrists now!

Kudos to the kids selling drinks and crispy rice bars.

I was eyeing a nice retro-ey set of wooden alphabet and vocabulary picture blocks for $5, and said to Jenny, “You know, for five bucks, it’s okay with me that there are a couple missing. “I count 26 blocks, Bonnie,” she said. “I’m sure you’ve got the alphabet covered.” “Oh,” I said. Hmm. So…why do they leave a couple out? Would the seven-month-old baby I was buying these for ever notice, or care?

I picked up on a mysterious European baritone accent under the blue canopy. After 12 years spent in four different regions of Europe, I like to think I’m rather good at pinpointing any European dialect accurately within 100 miles, but this guy? He had me really stumped. Just then, Jenny whispered: “It’s Furniture Guy!” Oh, how this made my Yard Sale Bloodbath day. To get to meet one of the characters from the blog, right off the bat like that? It was electrifying. “He’s some kind of European!” I whispered with excitement. Jenny said, “I never really noticed an accent. He’s just annoying.” “So he’s Annoying Furniture Guy?” I asked. “No,” Jenny clarified. “We just call him ‘Furniture Guy.’ You’re thinking of ‘Annoying Jewelry Guy.’”

I was impressed with Jenny’s reserve. I don’t get out much, nor am I the big shopper. So after getting the wooden baby blocks, I coveted a $2 stainless steel OXO utensil holder with rubberized base and several pricey metal spatulas of varying forms. A decent enough deal, I thought.

We then drove to Broadview, a gorgeous hill of ’50s- and ’60s-era homes north of Ballard. I admired the sweeping views of Puget Sound and all the successful and well-tended landscaping of the homes. Yet I was puzzled by strange signs that read, “Arterial Ends Here.” We have no such signs in Portland. I asked Jenny, “Does that mean it turns into a vein?”

Our estate sale looked busy; there was even a line. Jenny pointed out that under normal circumstances, she wouldn’t waste precious morning yard sale minutes waiting in a line, and so we decided to check out a nearby sale. But Jenny warned me once we saw its sign: “Balloons are one of the telltale signs that a yard sale might suck.”

Ruh-roh! There were the balloons, all chipper and flowing in the breeze. I spotted some ugly, Boomer-style golf clubs right at the front of their carport.

A woman was selling mostly kitchen items and clothes. She needed to slice her prices by about 80%, but who was I to tell her that? She lives in a house in Broadview, and I don’t. Rich people don’t stay rich by giving things away for free. But one item caught my eye, and wasn’t horribly overpriced: this lovely red enamel griddle with panini-making lid for $5.

I wanted it. I wanted it bad. But I also wanted one textured-fabric black skirt, too, and this delusional woman had priced it at $10. Crappy purses Jenny looked through were $15, $20, or more. Her overpricing actually started pissing me off about buying anything at all from her, even the panini griddle. I started making some dumb small talk about The Surprise Chef on PBS, how he would use two heated cast iron pans, one on top of the other, to smoosh marinated chicken pieces into grilled, crispy perfection. The woman didn’t give a shit. We left, me babbling about the panini pan, Jenny swearing that the lady would have every single item still in her possession the next day.

As we approached the estate sale, we noticed men scurrying to and from their cars, like leaf cutter ants, loading ’50s- and ’60s-era merchandise. They shot furtive glances at one another and at us, like anxious squirrels in autumn. The house had enormo windows upstairs and on the basement level, all overlooking gorgeous Puget Sound. We had to stand there in a really long line that simply did not move. It got ridiculous with the big, fat windows we peered into showing that there weren’t all that many people inside. What did they think we all would do? Shoplift? Still, it was while peering in those megawindows that I noticed the insanely overpriced stickers all over everything. Items had not one, but three, four, even five stickers covering them: $55 for some lousy end table. $175 for a weird retro lamp — that I coveted, but still. $28 for some dumb bronze statuette.

This place was betting on all of us yard sale saps to show up on the opening day and pay their doubled, tripled and quadrupled prices out of fear, and the peer pressure of standing in line with no way to buy anything.

So we stood there, wasting our precious lives, watching the human squirrels come and go with their purchases (Latin plural: “purchi”), hearing the occasional disgruntled remark about the cashier’s utter rudeness. Was this going to be the Estate Sale Soup Nazi? One man who exited the heavily guarded door said this as he emerged, head turned back at her: “I was just making sure I wasn’t the guy you were yelling at.” Niiice.

I noticed an abandoned coffee cup wedged into the shrubbery. Many of us felt a bit like that coffee cup. Then I saw a plant that looked just like marijuana, but Jenny assured me it wasn’t.

A couple of people in front of us left the line once they saw the inflated numbers on the little red-orange neon price stickers. Yay for moving up, any way we could! I snuck off to peer through those windows again. Red-orange stickers on everything, multiple times each. It certainly looked as if some obsessive type, or perhaps a person with delirium tremens in both hands, had applied those stickers to everything. I felt the strange lure of a yellow plastic toy horse that contrasted so nicely — so Swedishly, really — with the house’s slate blue exterior. The horse just seemed, well, special. My sons are 12 and 9, too old for such an item. But I wanted it.

Jenny was getting increasingly bored and annoyed. “Why do they only let one person in? It’s empty in there!” But on the front door, there was an aggressively masking-taped, explicit set of rules & regs. (Cash only! You haul larger items! No wire hangers!!!)

There was also a list of numbered signups that went all the way to #63 and included the names of people who’d come by early … some in the wee hours of the morning like 3:15 AM!

A couple of men in front of us, whose native language and origins I couldn’t discern (Armenia? Georgia? Afghanistan? Azerbaijan?) began joking around with us. They’d heard me whine about somebody buying my yellow horse out from under me. One of them jokingly told me he’d buy it, then sell it back to me at a higher price.

It had been more than an hour, and we began wisecracking about the Art Deco hand-shaped doorknocker and the woman behind the door who guarded the estate sale like a junkyard dog.

A lady behind us picked up on our merry banter. When one squirrel-like dealer exited, then entered, then exited again, hauling his purchases, she wondered out loud if he was a dealer, or if maybe he worked at Microsoft. She got bold on his fifth trip, and asked him both questions. “No,” he insisted, to both. “Maybe he just has good taste,” I said, which he heard, and actually turned around appreciatively to smile at me about. Is this the way to flirt in Seattle? Compliment some dude on his good taste in buying overpriced, Boomer-era crap? Maybe.

Finally, we were allowed in. Whew! Right away, we realized why we hadn’t seen people through those massive front windows: the house itself was labyrinthine, and a cornucopia of fascinating old merchandise of all kinds awaited us. Vintage clothes. Portraits. Furniture. Shelf items. Books. Collectibles. These people had traveled the world, and must have been some sort of ethnic Scandinavians, too, judging from all the music and story books in Icelandic. I picked up a couple of Norwegian and Icelandic little flags for a buck apiece, and grabbed a mug with a 3-D raptor’s head poking out over the handle for my crazy sons.

We were mesmerized by this bizarre 3-D puppy portrait (it’s hard to see, but the heads were puffed out in a trippy manner):

And this naked doll with multiple price tags stuck to her, right next to a cash register. It looked like some anti-human trafficking ad sponsored by the ladies of Hole.

Jenny couldn’t take her eyes off of a vintage Creepy Crawlers set with metal molding plates, but didn’t want to spend $35 on it. I spotted this gorgeous old Danish doll — just like one from my girlhood. Did I want it for $32? Um, nope.

I went down to the basement to the spot by the window where my beloved yellow plastic horse had beckoned me for well over an hour. Gasp! It was … gone. My heart sank. Then I realized that maybe, just maybe, the friendly and joking Armenian/Georgian/Afghan/Azerbaijani guy ahead of us had gone and grabbed it just to make a practical joke. I hoped so. But where was he? More and more people now were allowed in, and I got lost in the labyrinth. We made it to a room in the basement full of old music stands, sheet music, and miscellaneous books and papers.

We also spotted this frightening portrait (I wish I’d noticed how much they were asking!)

And around the corner … surprise! There was my guy, yellow horse and all. “I saved it just for you,” the man beamed, and I laughed a full belly laugh and thanked him for his very good deed.

Jenny was delighted by this exchange, but pointed out, “Bonnie … what do you want with a $16 yellow plastic horse?”

“Oh,” I said, “nothing, really. I have no use for it. It just looked so special sitting in the window of the blue house while we were bored shitless in line.”

“So … why buy it?”

“Because of the guy.” I didn’t want him to see me abandon the thing, not after all that merry banter.

Reason won out, though. Sixteen bucks for a dopey yellow plastic horse? I figured I’d spend the money more wisely buying us some pho for lunch.
Overhearing our decision to ditch the horse, a nice lady before us in line for the register whispered about the Estate Sale Soup Nazi, “She’ll make you put it back where you got it, you know.” Jenny, by this point, was OVER this sale, no matter how fascinating some of the items wound up being. “I’m not fucking putting it back,” she said to me as an aside. She set the horse high up atop a filing cabinet, where it stared out at Puget Sound.

And it wasn’t too out of place there. There was a myriad of oddball vintage toys spread out on a table near the register.

I couldn’t wait to hear and see the Estate Sale Soup Nazi lady in all her rude glory. I figured I’d stir the pot a little by asking if, as an Oregon resident, I could please be exempted from Washington sales taxes. This meant forty cents in my case, but it’s the principle. “Sales tax exemption doesn’t apply to estate sales,” Rude Lady told me in a cold voice. “At least I asked,” I smiled at her. Jenny got a little Ratfink charm and a couple of vintage monster art cards for her husband. They were all unpriced, and she was fearing the worst, but pleasantly surprised to only be charged a dollar for the bunch.

Our next adventure took us to the enclave of Magnolia, to yet another estate sale. We loved our first glimpse of the lavish lifestyle this formerly-alive-and-well couple must have enjoyed. Trips galore to Russia, Holland, and Egypt! Collector plates and spoons from all states and presidents! Hummel figurines! (Even a Hummel nun’s head!)

I loved how you could take such places as Saint Basil’s Cathedral and the Notre Dame de Paris home with you in your carryon, for posterity.

These little figurines were a reminder of who truly built America. Not my generation, that’s for damn sure, though we enjoy blogging about it!

There were just so many collector’s items and souvenirs from everywhere that I started thinking about it. Would I someday wind up like that? In assisted living, surrounded by a few items of collectible crap while, back at the house my kids were liquidating out from under me, some snippy yard sale bitches were having a righteous laugh at my expense? Should I become a Buddhist, maybe? Follow the four-fold then eight-fold path, and aspire to not own so much shit? Sigh. I pondered this while looking at more and more and more realms of stuff.

Jenny got all crazy-claustrophobic in one bedroom, seeing this Wall of Shelf Objects and Stuffed Animals from Hell. Yikes!

I almost thought she might need to buy some of this ancient liquor and pour herself a shot of Caffe Lolita or Pineapple Liqueur.

In another room, we found this stack of a frighteningly-named item: Wee-Wee Pads. Complete with possible picture of the puppy who wee-wee’d on them.

And that wasn’t the only dog … this guy was taped up to the wall of the downstairs bathroom.

I got all giddy when Jenny pointed out a Pepsi bottle with Cyrillic writing! Later that night (at 826 Seattle, in a performance with Verbalists) I would be reading from my 1989 memoir story of traveling from Munich to Moscow via Berlin. I was THERE around the time these estate sale’s elderly folks must have been! They might have bought and actually drunk from the $1 bottle, in Russia. Or not — I know that when I was in Russia, I’d have given my right arm to drink something other than nasty rye bread kvass or sickly-sweet port. Pepsi, no matter the funky writing on the label, would have been a welcome sight.

Then we encountered a chatty, friendly old guy who was walking around the estate sale carrying a huge bird cage housing his sulfur-crested little parrot!

At first I thought he had bought the cage or bird there, but pretty quickly we figured out he lived down the street and was using his pet bird as a conversation starter. “I like to take him out around the neighborhood,” the guy said, holding up the cage to us. “He likes meeting new people.” It was sweet, and somehow I felt he’d beaten me to the punch. After all, I’m the Portlander, not him. I was supposed to put a bird on it, right? Seattleites, always outdoing Portland. At least now I know why the caged bird goes estate sale-ing!

And the best thing? The estate sale cashier at this second place answered my sales-tax-for-Oregonians question honestly. “Just show me your license and I’ll jot down your address, and that way, you save ten cents off the $1 Pepsi bottle,” she said, friendly and helpful as all get-out. I didn’t make her bother, but was happy to have confirmation that the woman from the first sale was not only rude, but a baldfaced liar to boot.

Jenny and I had a $13 day overall. A day of fun and laughs, with a bit of rudeness and frustration for good measure, and a whole lot of cool old stuff no one really needs, but a surprising number of people will stand in line to paw through.

A hearty salute to Bonnie for riding along to sales, resisting the siren songs of the yellow plastic horse and the red panini pan, and making it out with her wits intact. And for saving ME from having to recap this questionable, yet entertaining day!

The weather has been sort of freakishly nice in Seattle for the last couple of months. So last Saturday it still really felt like yard sale season … even though we know full well that October is when sales really slow down around here (and the few there are tend to be questionable). Still, we headed out with a list of possibilities, hoping for the best. One of them had been listed as “EPIC YARD SALE” and had signs galore promising the same.

After looking around, all I can say is that perhaps they are interpreting the word in their own special way. I’m not sure anyone has ever used “epic” to describe used crockpots and George Foreman grills.

The rest of the sale was pretty bad and Meghan even spotted a neti pot — used. Gross! As far as I’m concerned, once that thing goes up your nose, you own it for life.

Our next stop didn’t look too bad from a distance …

… but up close it was a bit sketchy.

We’ve joked about the “top three things not to have at your yard sale” before, but let me add that anything that has come in close contact with an intimate part of one’s body probably deserves an honorary place on that list.

It wasn’t all scary … these school desks with years of carved graffiti were pretty cool, though it’s not like I have a place for them or wanted to spend $65.

An hour or two in I still hadn’t purchased anything. Meghan picked up a cute vintage dress for $2 so the day wasn’t a total bust. But it didn’t seem to be going great … especially when we came across this!

Another one?! At least this time it wasn’t used … but still. Meghan stated that it was not acceptable if “neti pots” were the theme of the day, and I wholeheartedly agreed. But the only other possible themes that presented itself wasn’t t much better … creepy angels and elves, anyone?

At least there was some comic relief. When we drove up to an intersection and saw this sign with arrows pointing in two completely different directions, we laughed for a solid minute.

We had just about decided to call it a day when we saw signs for a church rummage sale. I hadn’t seen any listings for it, but when we got there we both recognized it from last year and remembered it being pretty good. It was around 11:00 and they seemed to have just opened, judging from the people just putting up signs out front … and the fact that there were several prime pieces of vintage clothing sitting there waiting for Meghan to purchase them for a few bucks each.

I remembered the books being good last time and started accumulating a pile. Some of them were advance reader copies but lots were just recent purchases someone had decided to get rid of. I spent six dollars and filled most of a small box.

That one sale sort of saved the day for us … it’s really the only reason we even have a trunk shot this week!

Last Saturday was the first time in ages that Meghan, Karl, and I all went to sales together! We were excited and even more so when our first stop was some crazy sale listed as “DJ and yard sale” promising a variety of DJ-riffic items including a LASER LIGHT SYSTEM! Of course, we were all fighting over who was gonna get dibs on that. It ended up being a total driveby — a woman sitting in a chair next to three or four boxes of what looked like total junk. Eek!

As we sped away from that, we randomly passed a sale where Meghan knew the seller. She had a ton of stuff, and was it wacky? You know it!

Meghan bought a bunch of vintage sewing patterns here and I made one purchase — the “I Hate Brenda” paperback! For 50 cents, how could I resist?

Next up was a sale whose ad sounded great — it was listed as “part 2″ but Meghan hadn’t hit it the previous weekend and they promised to have brand new stuff. Most of it was clothes. She had some great stuff, but the prices were on the high side.

However, her CDs were a buck and she had good stuff — I think we all picked up a few. I looked through the books, but didn’t find anything, though I thought this “warning label” was pretty cute.

Meghan did buy a few things here including a large letter “U” and a sweet pink Lomography Diana camera in its box.

I was excited to hit our next sale since it was listed as vintage — even showing a picture of a vintage house, which I assumed was where the sale was, but no! It was actually a sale we’d hit last year where the guy had tons of old posters and rock flyers. We recognized it right off the bat.

Funny, looking at the last pic — the Gary Numan and Bogart posters were in the sale last year. If at first you don’t succeed, try again, I guess! He had new stuff out this year though, like a double-sided Tubes promo display that gave both Meghan and I flashbacks to the record stores of our youth.

Here’s the back side, in case you needed to know what that looked like …

He also had this box of vintage sunglasses.

Some of these were amazing and he said they were $10 each, which is higher than we would have liked … but we had to dig through. A couple pairs were sadly a bit too damaged, but a lot of them were really amazing. I grabbed one pair and he ended up charging me $5. I also bought some old iron-on t-shirt displays with ’80s skating and surfing logos for my skater-dude husband. Meghan splurged on about three pairs of sunglasses and I think a couple of other things — she was also tempted by this statuette, but it was just too chipped up.

We then hit a “two-block sale” which turned out to be one sale on each block. The first guy had some intriguingly oddball art books but the mood was sort of spoiled when he yammered on and on about how much stuff he had had earlier that already got bought. While he was talking to me about a vintage library-card cabinet (that would have been cooler if all of the pull knobs hadn’t been broken off) Meghan was taking a picture of this creepy portrait in his garage. (I don’t think it was part of the sale.)

We got a snack and then debated whether to stay in Ballard, or head over to a “rock and roll sale” in the parking lot of the Rickshaw Restaurant and Lounge, a fairly bizarre and divey Chinese restaurant/karaoke bar that has been closed ever since they had a fire back in March. The potential for strangeness won out and we headed up there, only to find … nothing at all in the parking lot! Then we spotted a sale in front of the house next door. Close enough, I guess. We pulled up and were greeted by this masterpiece.

Both intrigued and scared, we got out and started to look around. Karl and Meghan beelined over to the records while I perused the other stuff. Books and zines were spread across the driveway and while it was an encouragingly odd mix, I didn’t find anything I needed to bring home.

Most of the cassettes were of the indie/weird variety, but there were a couple of cheesy looking motivational items as well.

They also had a handful of t-shirts and other random items.

I think I was the only one to leave this sale empty-handed.

At this point we were sort of close to an estate sale that had been listed as “What a digger!” Honestly, I am not sure what the sellers think that “digger” means … everything was arranged fairly neatly, maybe there were a few boxes that needed to be unearthed in the basement but on the overall scales of estate sale this one was pretty sane and tidy. And expensive … they had a few items I was sort of drawn to, but not for what they were asking.

This was not one of them — I do not want this in my house for any price.

One room had an odd assortment of toys and games. This pink elephant and mutant-looking dog seemed to belong together. I don’t know what is up with that “Jogger” thing in the background.

At one point Meghan called out, “I love Benji!” I thought it was a random proclamation, but no.

As we drove away we decided that the three most overused words in sale ads at the moment are “digger,” “picker,” and “hoarder.” Sometimes your sale is just a sale. You don’t have to make it sound like whatever dumb show is on TV right now. If your sale isn’t potentially hazardous I don’t consider it a digger, and if you are selling your own items you are pretty much by definition not a hoarder. As for pickers, I think Meghan said it best earlier this year: “You don’t need to carry a fucking loupe and a flash light with you to yard sales. Yes, I get that you saw that on TV, but are you Frank Fritz? No. You aren’t.”

We stopped at one sale where they had this wacky outfit hanging up.

Karl bought a perfectly-sized-for-records wooden crate from them and found out they were moving to Berkeley, where I’m from — one of the sellers asked me if I had any advice and I couldn’t think of a thing. I should have told her not to take the brown acid — yes, that is Woodstock, not Berkeley, but hippies gonna … hip? The seller also told me a funny phrase she had heard to describe newer-style hippies, but sadly I have completely forgotten it now.

We then drove by this sign for a “Stupid Sale.”

I remembered that Meghan had blogged about going to a “Stupid Sale” a few years back and I thought she’d said it had been bad, but now that I look at the post again I see that it turned out to be “so stupid that [she] couldn’t even find it.” We didn’t end up going to this one, but we did have a discussion about how if you are going to call your sale stupid, you might as well take it all the way and write “STOOPID.”

That turned out not to be the only stupid sign we saw. BARGANS, anyone?

And there was this — though technically not so much stupid as dyslexic.

This other sign was cute — not stupid at all (unless you count the fact that it was lying on the ground in front of the sale, which I suppose isn’t really the best advertising method).

We went to a few more sales, but honestly it’s a blur. All I can tell you is that we saw a family of dog statues …

… and a $200 lobster painting.

All in all, I was happy with the few purchases I made and it was a pretty fun day.