Jenny and I haven’t been to sales together since October. This might be a record for us. I went to one yard sale in November and I tried to follow a sign to a sale in December that just led me to drive around in circles. We have talked about sales and we have spoken about the blog on a weekly basis, but standing in the rain to get into the few estate sales we have in winter is a major drag. I also don’t really go in for the whole intense aggressive picker vibe that seems to happen when there are fewer sales to go around.

The sun has been coming out a little bit more and we made the commitment to hit sales last Saturday, even knowing that we would be celebrating my birthday the night before. Heck, I have done tons of yard sales hung over before.

I was able to get up a decent hour, but all I could think about was getting some food in me, and we both seemed to be a bit out of practice. Jenny even said she had forgotten how she usually does our list of sales, but she managed to get one together. Our first stop was a basement moving sale and they really had nothing.

The highlight of the basement was this great hand-painted Wizard of Oz poster that was pretty sweet.

I did buy some books, one being a ’50s Ballard High yearbook, but it was mainly a bust.

Jenny received a call from Karl about a sale on Capitol Hill that he had just hit which had some women’s shoes and clothing that he thought we might like. After driving by another sale that just didn’t seem to be happening we made the choice to head over to the hill. The sale wasn’t as amazing as we thought it might be, but it was better than average for the middle of winter. The seller seemed like she had been some major party girl back in the day, but had settled down, had a kid, and couldn’t fit into her XS Betsey Johnson dresses anymore. We both picked up a few items.

Karl had told us to avoid the next sale on our list, so we made the choice to hit a different part of town. I ended up not using my head and taking us some really stupid way, and we drove past another sale.

Seemed like my bad driving was possibly meant to happen, but this was not the case. The sale was filled with crap, and the guy had $30 price tags on most clothing items. The kicker? He was walking around the garage playing guitar and singing. No, not some hippie song, but one of those songs that are only in chick flicks, like Bed of Roses. Simply awful.

After heading over to the Ravenna area, we hit this sale that had boxes and boxes of stuff, but they never unloaded any of it, so you had to dig into these huge boxes to find anything.

The garage was packed to the brim, but I didn’t even want to go in there — in fact I wasn’t even sure if that was really part of the sale. It wasn’t dirty, just unappealing. Outside wasn’t much better. They had these couches that Jenny described as being all the things you don’t want in a couch: hideous, decrepit, cushionless, and floral.

They also had way too many aerobics VHS tapes from the ’80s.

As we drove to one of the last sales we both started laughing when we saw their sign at the end of the block.

Jenny took a photo, then I jumped out of the car to stick my head into the hole in the gingerbread head.

The sale itself was pretty bad, but worth it just for the laugh factor.

After this we headed back towards our neck of the woods. There was a sale we’d been curious about since they had listed “boomerang tables” in their ad, but we figured they would either be expensive or crappy (or both). When we realized we were going to be driving pretty close by, we ended up checking it out. The tables were beyond bad and there was no one even at the sale. The seller ended up coming outside and apologizing for how bad his sale was.

All in all it wasn’t the greatest day, but at least we made it out there for the first time in months. It can only go up from here, right?