The Greenwood-Phinney neighborhood sale is one of our favorite big sale days. Partly because we have been going to it for a long time — probably more than ten years by now. Back when it was held in April, we thought of it as our “spring opener” for the season. It was the subject of our first real post on this blog (and our first-ever trunk shot) and we have blogged about it ever since, through snow and moving it to September (probably prompted by that snow) and then moving it to May and still having crappy weather sometimes anyway. This year, they finally hit the weather jackpot. It was a gorgeous sunny day!

We got to the neighborhood pretty early, so we decided to make a coffee stop first. The cafe had set out some “garage sale items.” I picked up a couple of things.

Buying stuff before we even really hit sales seemed like a good sign. And as we started making the rounds, it started to seem like a pretty good day. A couple folks who usually have great sales weren’t set up this year, but all in all the sales seemed better than average. Nothing was really amazing, but we were both picking up things here and there, and it seemed like a fairly interesting mix of items.

One of our earlier stops had this amazing sign out in front of the house.

We asked him if a guy had come by asking about jewelry and were surprised when he said no. He was pretty cool and also had entertaining price stickers on a few items.

I don’t think we bought anything at his sale, but I know we picked up things on the same block. There was a stretch of four or five stops where somehow I ended up buying one book at each sale (I was sort of glad that this trend didn’t continue throughout the day). I also bought a bunch of barely-worn stylish baby clothes for my three-month-old niece at a sale which could have practically stocked a kiddie clothes store.

Meghan spotted this trio of whiskey bottles at another sale — one each for Bourbon, Scotch, and Rye. After some debate, she decided it was too cool not to purchase.

But while things had gotten off to a pretty good start, the quality of the sales did seem to be declining a bit as we continued on. I think it started going downhill right around the time we spotted this scary-looking sale, which of course we checked out anyway. It was as bad as we expected.

Of course we took lots of photos throughout the day. The evidence reveals that we really did see a lot of things as we made the rounds.

For instance, we saw this star-spangled sequined cap.

Which would perhaps best be worn with this jacket.

We saw these paintings.

And this giant owl.

We saw a bunch of homemade wood benches, each with its own pun-laden, apostrophe-abusing sign.

We saw Disco Fever.

We saw Oktoberfest.

We saw The Ass Family.

We saw a box of union buttons.

We saw a bag of toilet paper rolls.

We saw this wedding hat (that seemed to have come right out of the Stepford Wives).

We saw a psychedelic-looking Bingo game (that turned out to be pretty much regular bingo inside).

We saw some bricks (though not all 200).

We saw Barbie’s rides.

We saw this hideous chair.

We saw these godawful speakers.

And we saw a cat with a cross.

We saw some things that were priceless.

And we saw stuff that had been set out for free.

We grabbed a couple of those free items, like a toy rubber tiger and a “Furnished Apartment For Rent” sign. But we passed on the “free to a good home” bear with provocatively-posed tail.

There was certainly plenty of bad stuff out there, but on the whole, this year’s sale day was pretty decent. The weather was awesome. There were fewer sales than there used to be several years ago, but there were also fewer crazy traffic jams as shoppers tried to navigate through all the narrow streets. And the items were definitely a mix of good, bad, and ugly … but there was still enough “good” for a decent trunk shot!