Now that Meghan has gotten the ball rolling I suppose I should introduce myself as well. I also grew up going to yard sales with my parents, along with thrift stores and trips to the crazy free box (really more like a huge free pile) at the park two blocks from my house in Berkeley, CA. I appreciate all of these to this day (not that there are too many free boxes around anymore, but there always seems to be a moving stream of random free stuff). But yard/estate/rummage sales are my favorites these days; it’s getting rarer and rarer for me to go into a thrift store, and I usually come out empty-handed when I do. With sales we usually have to hit a lot of duds before finding anything good, but I think there’s  a much better chance of actually finding something great (at a less-ridiculously-marked up price – the thrifts that think everything over 20 years old is “collectible” drive me insane!).

For the past few years I have really been more in “get this crap out of my house” mode than “go out looking for crazy weird cool and probably unnecessary crap” mode, but I still love the thrill of the hunt and coming across random bizarre things you never even knew existed, let alone that you must possess. A lot of why I like yard saling is almost from an anthropological expedition point of view. I have fun even when I don’t buy anything, although obviously it’s always better to come back with a few choice scores.

Meghan and I have been hitting thrift stores and sales together since around 1998 and for a while we would go to yard sales every Saturday for about six hours, ten months out of the year. Now it’s more of a semi-monthly kind of deal, and the days are usually cut much shorter since we both have creatures at home that we need to get back and play with (puppy for Meghan, toddler for me). But we’re both still pretty obsessed with all things having to do with sales and can talk about them endlessly. Which is why we’ve been saying for years now that we better just do a freakin’ blog about them already!