After the last few weekends being pretty questionable I was tempted to flake on sales, especially with a drizzly forecast. However, someone posted a photo to our Facebook page with details about a fun-sounding moving sale. It started at 7 am, but we are not that hardcore, especially in winter, so we went around 9:00. All of the stuff was set up under a big tent. As expected, the seller was super nice and her items tended toward the wacky.

In addition to clothes and various household items there were also an assortment of “mystery item” grab bags!

The mystery theme extended into other areas, too …

Even the free box had its high points.

Meghan and I each bought a few things, and I decided to take a chance on a fifty-cent grab bag. After a quick ATM stop we headed off to the other sale on my radar, not too far away. Outside there were a bunch of tools and building materials stacked up–it looked very “guy.”

Not pictured: hundreds of records. We both started looking through then, and one of the guys running the sale came over and changed the sign from 50 cents each to 25 cents. Unfortunately this still wasn’t cheap enough to make me want to bring any of these records into my house. It was all crap you can find at any thrift store, and super crusty. Then I got to a box that seemed like something had spilled on it … I decided maybe it was better to take a look-but-don’t-touch approach to this sale.

Along with the vinyl there were plenty of 8-tracks.

And then there was this knife carrying case … I suppose there could be a normal reason for owning this, but it seemed a little ominous.

A couple of other rooms were also open, but there wasn’t much in them. Maybe that was for the best. I did find this lone figurine, which added to the whole “man cave gone wrong” vibe.

We left without buying a thing. Are you surprised? Then I realized I remembered that the listing I’d read was for a moving sale that had mentioned baby stuff, so I made the brilliant observation that there must be a different sale out there. I found the info and we hit that too, but it was a bust. We were eating breakfast before 10:30 AM.

Oh, and the “mystery item”? I think I got my fifty cents’ worth of entertainment.

After a six-week hiatus from sales (and blogging), we ventured out last Saturday–possibly despite our better judgment, but we figured it was time. There wasn’t that much rain, and there were a few sales listed …

Our first stop had been advertised as moving after 50+ years. Sounds pretty good! We walked in through the garage, which was full of things for sale, both new and old. Inside was this workshop area complete with outlined spots for tools and pictures of airplanes.

People were milling around from room to room. Meghan went to investigate some clothes hanging up in one corner. “Those aren’t for sale!” we heard. Okay, fine. We ventured into the next room, sort of confused as to what was in the sale and what wasn’t.

I poked around a bit then headed back outside to make another look around. I got a kick out of this small selection of ancient grocery items, but didn’t find anything I needed to own.

Finally I went back inside and found Meghan handing over some cash to the woman who’d told her to keep out of the clothes. As we left she told me that the entire room was supposed to be off limits, but since that wasn’t even remotely obvious, tons of people had been digging around and buying stuff anyway. Meghan made sure the lady knew what she had and was cool with selling everything. She ended up purchasing an awesome vintage sewing bag and a couple of other small items.

On the way out we saw Jesus.

We made a coffee stop, then headed to an estate sale which was due to open at ten, still a few minutes away. When we saw the line outside we weren’t sure whether to bother, especially after our last experience waiting in line for a sale. But we parked the car and walked over — nearly getting knocked down on the way by a man running with his small daughter in order to get there ahead of us. “Really?” Meghan asked loudly, but he pretended not to hear her. We couldn’t tell if there were numbers, a sign-up sheet, or just a line. Meghan went up to investigate and came back muttering something about possibly needing to re-evaluate her entire life.

The sellers opened the door (a few minutes late) and miraculously decided to let everyone in, since the house was big enough for the thirty or forty of us to all mill about. The setup was a bit odd: one room would have like ten things in it, then another would have three boxes … for a big house, they really didn’t have very much. I saw the guy who had rushed past us carrying around light bulbs and nothing else, so that tells you something. They did have a very cool, very old wedding dress. I attempted to take a picture of it, then later discovered I had actually taken a five-second video. Of a dress sitting on a hanger. I will spare you from spending five seconds of your life watching that.

We were done after that. It felt like if there was a holiday like Groundhog Day, where some yard sale totem animal — the pack rat? — came out of its hole to see if it was time to start going to sales again … that animal would have crawled back in and gone back to sleep for a few more weeks.

But we are either optimistic, or masochistic, or just plain dumb, because we are heading back out tomorrow!

Knowing it was probably against better judgment, we made a plan to go to some sales last Saturday. There were two estate sales fairly close to each other, so we decided to hit those first. One had started on Friday, but I figured that not too many people would be making the Friday run this time of year, right? And Saturday was half-price day, so we figured that could be good. Regardless, we decided to hit the new one first. We drove over and found a line of about 40 people out front — forget that. We backtracked to the sale that had started the day before.

On the way Meghan told me how she had heard that a lot of estate sale companies aren’t listing addresses in their ads, but just directing customers to a nearby intersections where signs are posted — apparently due to a rash of burglaries at houses where sales are about to happen. Some ads are also noting that people are sleeping on the premises for just this reason. Personally, I can’t imagine that robbing estate sale houses would be all that fruitful … I guess a lot of them do have silver and jewelry, but so many of them seem to be filled with nothing but crap!

When we finally got to the house (slightly hampered by my undercaffeinated direction-giving ability) we noticed this unique sign display.

Can we get a close-up?

Okay! Someone liked golf. I wondered if that would be the theme of the sale, and while there were a few golfing items it was really all over the map.

’80s Barbie coloring book? How about a Fonzie record?

The Fonz is not actually singing, it’s just a bunch of ’50s songs. And this “impressionist track.”

I carried it around for a while to show Meghan. She considered buying it, but ultimately decided that it (like almost everything in the house) was way too musty.

Then we went downstairs to what Meghan deemed the “tools and 8-track section.”

We laughed at this salted codfish box. Is “CSI: Nova Scotia” next in the series?

Meghan went upstairs and I noticed a sign saying “More Outside.” So I took a look.

Seriously?

Back upstairs, Meghan was paying for her one item, a $5 leather jacket from the ’50s (or possibly ’40s) that would probably be fine once it aired out. Then she noticed the fireplace with sky-blue painted walls and an astroturf floor.

The sellers happily let us take a picture and told us that the former occupants used to set up a manger scene in there.

On to the other estate sale. By now it had been open for a half-hour, but there was still a line outside! We figured it couldn’t be too bad at that point, so I hopped out of the car to get in line while Meghan parked down the street. While I was waiting for her, I overheard a guy up ahead saying that he was writing a book about garage sales. “It’s called Killer Sales,” he said. Uh, okay. Then he continued. “Twenty-six reasons to kill someone at a sale.”

It was taking forever for people to trickle out, but everyone seemed to have purchased something. Meghan asked the guys ahead of us how long they’d already been in line and they said a half-hour. Yikes. We tried to look inside to see if it seemed worthy. Meghan asked someone if there was good stuff inside and she said yes, but everything in her box looked crappy. We waited some more, freezing our butts off and making jokes with fellow line-waiters about arm-wrestling them over the good stuff, or how someone coming out with a huge pile of dusty fake roses had already gotten what we wanted.

Finally, they let us in. And after 20-plus minutes of waiting, we were in and out of that place in less than two minutes. Let’s see if you can guess why.

1. Dead reptile smell
2. Pee smell
3. Crazy prices
4. Crappy stuff
5. All of the above

Did you guess E? Correct! I’m even going to go out on a limb and say this was the stinkiest sale I have ever been to. And you know we have been to some stinky sales.

On the way out we commiserated with another sale-goer who was so annoyed by the sale that she said she wished she could leave it a bad rating somewhere. And then we decided to give up and get breakfast, which is probably the smartest thing we did all day.

On Friday I planned to work super early, so I could first hit what was listed as a packed Estate Sale, but turned out to be a massive hoarder sale.

Sometime you can piece together what happened in a house by what they owned or maybe someone will have some idea about the family. Like at some point in the 40s and 50s they owned a funeral home back East.

At this house they didn’t toss out much in the last 40 years. In fact I found boxes of kids clothing from 1976 — cords and striped shirts galore.

The basement was boxes of stuff and tools.

Loads of clothing from the last 40 years.

Saucers and plates piled all over the kitchen.

A bin of keys? How and why would you have like 60 sets of keys?

Or these boxed dress shirts?

Sadly, there was so much stuff that much of it had to be pulled outside.

The biggest bummer was that the man had been living in the kitchen and dining room, because there was so much stuff.

I did pick up a few items that could be tossed into a washing machine. But sales like this make me feel like I need to rid myself of everything I own.

Before.

After.

And that’s really all you need to know …