While Jenny was getting Saturday’s list together, she found a craigslist post for a sale claiming to have 400+ urinalysis cups. How could the day be bad, right?

Friday night I get a text message from Karl. “Are you guys REALLY going out at 8:00 am?” Um, yeah. Both Jenny and I have been doing pretty good starting on the early side. Nothing crazy aggressive, like hitting a sale that starts at 10:00am two hours early — we both find that a little rude, but stalking a sale that starts in 20 minutes or so seems reasonable. When Saturday morning rolled around we knew that Karl would be late, so we figured we’d hit a few nearby sales and then swing back and get him.

We hit a sale in a townhouse and I don’t mean to judge, but if your house was built in the last 3 years, I am probably not going to want anything you have. 1) I collect old junk and 2) if you moved in recently you won’t have accumulated much. Plus, most of them just feel like you are at Pottery Barn. This one did, but we both purchased some nice high-end closet organizing bins for $2 each. As I was walking away I saw a huge bag of unopened hotel and Sephora samples for $3. I always like that stuff around for when I travel, so I bought it. She told us that her “husband travels all the time” and that’s why there was so much. Sorting through it at home later, I found a bunch of unexpired condoms. EEK! Did she know that was in there? Kinda gives a new meaning to “my husband travels all the time” …

We drove back home to get Karl. It was the Crown Hill neighborhood sale and last year it was sort of sucky, but the year before it was great. I remember we filled the whole car up in just a few hours. We figured we would drive and start hitting some sales and we really did manage to hit a sale every few blocks. Sadly, most of them stunk.

At one of them I found this awesome fire ladder in its original box. By the time you find this in your closet and then hook it to your window, couldn’t you run downstairs and out the front door?

Then we hit a sale that had this insane table!

What would make you purchase that? If a friend gave that to you, are you still friends with that person?

At another sale, everything must have been in storage and instead of unwrapping everything completely they just laid it all out. This photo is a small part of what they had. Did they think it was effective, or was it pure laziness?

And then we came across this.

Were all the sales going to be this bad?

We went to a church sale that Karl had hit a few ago, saying it had been small but great. I walked toward the clothing and when Karl went to head me off, I full on pushed him out of my way. Then without saying a word he was gone. I told Jenny that I bet he was already walking down the block to hit the next sale. I was right on the money, and when I called him on it all he could say was “yeah, that sale bummed me out so badly that I had to leave.” I think was also the sale that he mentioned needing a unicorn chaser — our new code word for being at a bad sale and needing to hit a good one to balance out the yard sale universe.

At this point we all seemed to know that Crown Hill was sucking the big one and we should high tail it out of there. Of course we hit a few more on our way out of the area, even though we knew it was hopeless.

We couldn’t get over how badly the sales had been, especially for hitting so many sales. Picking a new area, even 20 blocks away, can really help. We pulled up at this one, where they had a lovely display of parasols.

Karl bought a t-shirt from this box. I’m not sure it was really “ironic” but at least it was cheap.

Then we found a sale that had sooo much oddball stuff out front, including this wacky rainbow nightgown and strange jacket.

The guy running the sale said many of the items had been donated from some kind of artist collective.

More items inside? Cool. I started pulling out tons of really nice vintage clothes, even filling up a box. I had said that I needed to know the prices and the woman took each item out, one by one, and talked to me about each piece. Jenny just parked it on the woman’s couch. Then the seller seemed to get defensive when I told her that I wasn’t going to buy all of them. I don’t mind paying for good vintage, but you need to pay me if I have to hear that much about each item.

After that we found a free pile with tons of records. Karl picked up a stack – most were bad, but the price was right.

Even with free records tossed in, the day just seemed really bunk. Hmm. I guess we really are going to hit the urinalysis cups sale! It was actually a pretty mellow sale, and the seller explained that they’d only been used to store her bead collection. Of course this is after we talked about buying yellow Gatorade on the way to the sale. Karl even one-upped that by saying if we gave him $10 he would pee into one of them. G-R-O-S-S.

All that was left was the 14th Annual Lockhaven Apartments sale. We have gone to this sale off and on over the years and you never know what you are going to find. Last year it was awful, but we did overhear the stellar garage sale goddess referring to herself in the third person. Most of the sales there were pretty bad, but then we hit one table with stuff from some woman that didn’t throw anything out for years. Pay Dirt. Everything was old and cheap and we spent at least twenty minutes digging through it all. Karl and I each filled a box for $10, Jenny bought $2 worth of wacky early ’70s catalogs, and pretty much everything you can see in the trunk photo came from there. For a sale we didn’t expect to have much, it sort of saved the day.