The Year on Driveways

Another thrifty year has come and gone – spreadsheet time! Although it felt like there were way fewer sales this year (and definitely fewer that made my heart go pitty-pat), my spreadsheet tells me I went out on a total of 35 days. They were unevenly spread through the year – some weekends I went out on consecutive days, then there would be weeks when it wasn’t worth taking the car out. Still, I managed to spend $256.55, which procured an estimated retail value of over $5000. I say phooey to retail – at least most of the time!

The total spent was about twice as much as last year, but 2020 should probably just be stricken from the books, right? One bright spot is that I brought home three items (total expenditure $4.50) that I resold for a profit of $100.88. So that paid for almost half of the year’s fun. There was a pair of Heath Ceramic dinner plates (they sold overnight, wish I’d priced them higher!), 

a rummage sale blouse of a pricey brand,

and a vintage Erica Wilson embroidery kit that turned fifty cents into $31+.

While I bought three splurges (all were art!), of the 168 things I brought home, 66 were fifty cents or less, and only 49 were over a dollar. I confess I'm astounded that I added that many items to my home. There were 27 pieces of clothing and (goodness!) 8 pairs of shoes. Sounds like a lot, doesn’t it? But the most I paid for anything was three bucks, and the total for all that was $54.25. Okay, I feel better now – especially when I see that some of the shoes are still available to buy retail – for $210 a pair.

My entertainment category had the highest number, 23 books, magazines and movies. Kitchen things were right behind with 22 – ranging from cute tiny plates to stainless steel skillets to a glass made specifically for drinking Canadian whiskey. Not just any whiskey, Canadian. That was worth the twenty-five cents just to learn that such a thing existed. But the Dansk bowls that match the mugs I already owned may be my favorite in this category.

Looks like my poor pets were a little neglected this year. I brought home only 2 things for them, and Millie managed to break the ceramic treat jar within a couple of days. However, the little quilt is still a fave of them all.

The ‘category of shame’, otherwise known as donations, was not terribly embarrassing this year – 21 items that totaled $19.55. And five of those were free. So that brings my total down to 147 items – doesn’t that sound better?

Probably the biggest thrill of the year was the only piece of furniture I bought – the vintage midcentury double bed with the amazing headboard. 

For five bucks. I'm still thrilled – and the vintage double sheets I bought for a buck apiece were the icing on the cake!

Actually, I have to amend that – the bed was the second biggest thrill. Best of all was reaching the millionth visitor milestone back in March. Wow. Thanks for coming along for the ride – now let’s see what 2022 will bring!

The New Blanket

Zoe’s been needing a new blanket. I know you know that when I say new, I mean new-to-us, not new-new. She likes something portable that she can dig and arrange and create a nest. She’s been using one made of two layers of fleece with the edges cut into strips and tied together. The fabric is cute and she’s gotten a lot of use from it, but…it’s made of polyester.

The more I read of the pollution in the ocean caused by laundering polyester textiles, the more bothered I've become about it. There is almost no polyester in my clothing and household goods (you know me and cotton and linen and cashmere!) but here was this blanket. Which, being used entirely by dogs who drag it around and sleep on it, definitely needs laundering fairly often. So I decided to look for a replacement made of cotton. I figured I'd see one of those loosely woven cotton throws before too long (which I haven’t).

But I think I found something better – a thick small sized quilt that apparently was originally from World Market or the like. Spotted it at a sale in my old neighborhood on Friday, with a price tag of two bucks. As it turned out it was the only find of the day, but that’s fine, because it's been a total hit.

I threw it into the washer as soon as I got home. Washed and dried beautifully. It's thick, hand quilted with what appears to be a cotton batting. 

I took it into the house and laid it on the bed to admire, and two seconds later saw this.

A couple minutes passed and....

All three of my girls love this thing! Right now it’s covering their side of the bed. I keep finding them hanging out on it during the day, 

and at bedtime they line up down its length and snooze all night. The size is perfect both for the bed and for the sofa during the day, especially as it gets cooler. I haven’t told the girls yet, but I really like this thing too. We may have to work out some kind of time share agreement so I can get cozy under it too.

It almost makes me look forward to winter. I see myself snuggled into my red sofa, sipping a cup of tea, reading a good book, quilted throw over my legs, Millie on my lap, Fannie holding down one side and Zoë the other.

The furnace will not be needed, and there will be absolutely no chance of me falling off the sofa!

She Shoots! She Scores!

I don't know about you, but I'm pretty sure the dreaded 2020 is not over yet – 2021 seems to be channeling the spirit of its predecessor quite nicely, thank you. I actually wrote this post over three weeks ago, but I dawdled a bit on posting it…which was a mistake.

The first glitch was that we had an ice storm. From what long-time residents tell me, this was an ice storm like no one had seen here before. If there are Hundred Year Floods, then this was the Hundred Year Ice Storm. First it rained, then the rain got colder and colder, and turned to liquid ice, and coated everything. Everything. Salem is known for our beautiful trees, and every tree had an inch or more of glittering ice on it. Which weighed them all down, trees were bent to the ground. And then – they started to break.

Huge limbs started falling in the night. Whole trees split down the middle. Birches and oaks were especially hard hit, and a lot of huge oaks were completely uprooted. Power lines, tangled in the huge street trees, started coming down. And transformers began to explode. I heard four or five in the area around my house go before there was one more large bang – and the lights went out.

My electricity was out for five days. My gas furnace needs electricity to ignite, so no heat. I was able to manually light burners on the stove to cook, which is a very weird experience in the pitch dark. Thank heavens for my headlamp I bought for early morning trips to the dog park. It got colder and colder. After the second night, I begged a bed from my ex (his apartment had only a brief power outage) and the dogs and I slept over there. When they crews finally came and reconnected my block, I went out and clapped and cheered for the guys. I hope I never take heat and light and convenience for granted again.

However, the fun was not yet over. The city looked like a war zone – in fact, the WWII memorial downtown looked like a battle had just taken place there. Cleanup crews were out immediately, and it's only the last few days that the sound of chain saws and wood chippers has not been constant. Part of the collateral damage was that the Internet was knocked out. And even when it showed they had fixed the storm outage in my area, I still had no WiFi. I'm not particularly proud of the fact I was more fretful over not having any Internet for three weeks than I was about not having power. It's a little scary, how much of our daily lives depends on the Web. It didn’t help when they failed to show up for the repair appointment I had a week ago, and I had to wait five more days for another appointment. In fact I was in a right old snit about it. I send out huge thanks to my friends who listened to me whine during that week!

We are more or less back to normal, and Spring is getting closer; in fact, there are daffodils blooming in my yard. Perhaps it was 2020’s last hurrah. Let’s hope so!

With that explanation for the delay, let me take you now to the post I wrote in those more-innocent days of three weeks ago…

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Driving home from the dog park Thursday morning I noticed a big Estate Sale sign leading into my neighborhood. Even though it was early, barely eight o’clock (we hit the dog park at first light), naturally I followed the sign, which led me to a street 3 blocks from mine. I went on home with Zoë and after feeding the gang, checked Craigslist for more info on the sale. Sure enough it was there, along with a listing for another sale back in my old neighborhood, and that one had a Picture of Interest.

Back in October when I had knee surgery and Marcia was staying with me, I put my queen size bed in the guest room and moved the twin bed for me to use. Much easier to get in and out of than the larger and higher one. I liked having the bigger bed in the guest room, so I decided to part ways with the pair of twin beds in there and get a double or queen instead. That room has a rather large closet – in fact it is just about the size of a twin bed, and so I put a bed in there. 

It was quite cozy and I enjoyed sleeping in there from time to time, but as I've gotten older and creakier it got harder to do things like change the sheets. So I moved the bed out of the closet and have now turned it into my cozy reading nook.

So…I have been looking for a different bed since fall. Saved a search on Craigslist so I see all the new listings, and let me tell you, there are a lot of ugly beds out there! I looked at that estate sale listing and saw a possible candidate, so I headed out, all masked up and keeping my social distance.

When I got to the sale, I chatted with one of the workers while I looked at a few things on the driveway, and I noticed a footboard and side rails for a bed. Asked her if they went with the headboard I'd seen in the picture and she said she didn’t know for sure, her boss at the estate sale company handled the furniture. “He’s the one who knows about that, things like what kind of feet are worth more,” she said. My heart sank a little, sounded like he might actually be an expert, and when I went inside I saw that some things were pretty pricey. Couldn’t locate the headboard in any of the bedrooms, but then I realized they had moved all the furniture into the living/dining room. And there it was behind a couple of ottomans, a double headboard just the size I've been wanting.

When I got close, my heart started to go pitty pat. I could see immediately this was a midcentury piece, either teak or walnut, possibly Danish. I've never seen anything like it (and I've looked at a lot of midcentury furniture since I bought my MCM house). 

Though made of wood, it appears to be woven – the top rail is carved, I'm sure by hand, to look like thick straps going over.

This thing is absolutely exquisite, and I knew I wanted it – if I could afford it. I tipped it toward me so I could see the price written on a piece of masking tape, fingers crossed.

Are you ready?

Five dollars. Five dollars. Holy yard sale gods. I about fainted…but didn’t want to take the time to pick myself up from the floor. I started wrestling that puppy out from behind those ottomans. About then the lady I'd talked to on the driveway came in and asked me if I wanted her to take it out for me. I managed to keep myself from jumping up and down with joy as I let her take it, saying I wanted the footboard and rails too.

I did a quick turn through the rest of the house, and emerged with a little splurge – a $4 Noritake hen with lovely details

plus a $2 original watercolor that’s been nicely framed. 

Let’s just say I was distinctly unimpressed with the knowledge of the ‘furniture expert’ who priced the bed, but perfectly happy to make such a score.

As it happens, I was even less impressed with the man when I stopped by the other sale on my way home. Turns out both were being handled by the same estate sale company, and I'm sure the "furniture expert" was the guy who seemed to be in charge at the second one. The guy in the garage greeting people – and not wearing a mask. In fact he appeared to be boasting about it to the person who went in just before me. Unlike the first sale, this place was way crowded, and I left almost immediately. If I had felt any twinge of remorse over my bargain with the bed (okay, I really didn’t!) it would have vanished after seeing him.

So my guest room is on its way to a new look. I still need to find a mattress and bedding, but that’s an adventure for another day. I've searched and searched online to try to get a line on the maker of the bed, but have found nothing comparable. So it may be quite rare. I found a stamp on the back that seems to be a date, “Aug 18” but the year is blurred, I think it's something like 1965. And ‘waln’ hand written, so it's probably walnut. But even though I haven’t found a match for it, perusing eBay and other sale sites convinces me I found an amazing deal, one of my best ever. Hop over to eBay and do a search for ‘midcentury headboard’. Let’s just say that none of them are priced at five dollars!

The Old Year and the New

If you read novels, maybe you too have noticed this in recent years: seems like the description for just about every book includes the phrase “it changed her/his/its life forever.” Completing the unfinished sweater mom left behind, exposing a long-held secret, marrying Genghis Khan, traveling through the jungle on the back of an anaconda …you name it, your life is changed forever. Am I the only who thinks, well duh, of course it does. Every time we turn right instead of left, we change our life (who knows what was around that other corner?).

But yes, sometimes your life does change forever, and 2018 brought a wagonful of changes for me. Divorce, selling the house, moving to a much smaller house – sometimes it seemed as though my head was spinning. Through it all, thrifting remained a soothing constant, something I could count on most weeks for frugal fun. The other constant is the dog park every morning, rain or shine – an hour there and I have dogs that sleep through the day, no park and they are fidgety as jumping beans. Just like me when I don’t get to go garaging on the weekend!

Another through line has been continuing to maintain my garaging spreadsheet; I still love recording what I find, what I paid, its probable retail cost. And I'm extra glad to be able to share the year’s statistics, because one of the ‘changed my life forever’ things that happened recently was having my computer’s external hard drive die. And with it probably 85% of my files from the past umpty years. I hang my head in shame to admit I was careless about saving everything in more than one place, so I really can only blame myself (and also the hard drive, but it doesn’t care if I'm mad at it). Some pieces of writing I treasured, years of pictures – well, you know what you have in your files. But life goes on. I've decided that the drive was burned up in a fire or fell off the back of my Conestoga wagons as I crossed the prairies. As Judy so wisely put it, nobody died. I have a new life now, and my computer life is starting fresh too.

But – hooray! – I do still have my personal journals for the past 20+ years, and my garaging spreadsheet remains. So here is how the past year shaped up as far as garaging went.

First category is Accessories: bought 28 for about $37, retail would have been about $515.

Clothes: 45 for $42; retail would have been about $2500. Now you know why everything in my closet was bought secondhand!

Crafting/makery supplies: 72 items for $59; value about $900.

Décor: 45 items for $152; value about $2365. (45 pieces of décor…sheesh! But most pieces are small as in ornaments, and there was all the original art I've so enjoyed.)

Entertainment: bought 52 for $110, value of $1200. Mostly DVDs, books, CDs; the big splurge was my bike – but $60 for a $500 bike is a pretty thrifty splurge.

Furniture: only 4 pieces for $128, value around $700. The mattress & springs for $100 was spendy for me, but a great deal. And man, is that one comfy bed. 

Possibly the deal of the year was in this category – the dining table purchased for one buck from the Goodwill bins.

Gifts: 16 for $12, value about $220. Most satisfying were the things I found for my friend Jeff, including that vintage Mickey Mouse backscratcher!

Household: had to be a biggie what with moving! Bought 65 pieces for just under $170, with a value of about $3500. This category included the vintage Gaetano Sciolari brass chandelier that was free and is worth about $1800, as well as the vintage fixture I put in my new bathroom. The category also includes all kinds of practical stuff, a package of nails, sheets and towels, clothespins, a spare toothbrush…

Kitchen: 62 in this category for $105, value about $835. Although we had doubles of many items to divide, inevitably there were gaps in my kitchen equipment. A set of dishes here, a pan there, the perfect paring knife, some lovely vintage linen dish towels. (I confess I had no idea there were 62 though!)

Pets: only 7 items for them, for $6.10, value $145.

Garden: 29 items for $105, value $905. This is going to continue to be an important category, since my new place has a double lot that is…in need of complete landscaping. So far I focus more on the beautiful creek that runs about 10 feet from the back of my house rather that all that needs doing in the yard! (Have I mentioned that along with ducks and geese and a kingfisher and a zillion squirrels that there is an otter living outside my back door?)

If you’ve read my annual roundup before, you know that there’s one more category on my spreadsheet: Donations. Sometimes I bring things home and then change my mind (hangs head in chagrin), and I always vow to do better, and it's always an uphill battle. But this year, because of the extreme downsizing necessary when your accommodations shrink by two-thirds, I had to let go of a lot of stuff. Some from this year, most from previous. We held two moving sales, one at the old house and one here after the dust settled and I saw what I could actually live with instead of what I hoped would fit. Some of the decision-making was rather hard; I parted with things I still loved (remember the Steiff animals from last year?). 

But it was satisfying that everything seemed to go to the right person, so they are still loved, and honestly I can't think of anything I actually miss.

So – donations: spent $120 on the 98 items I did not keep. I'm sure a new record! But a good wake up call. My income and my space have both been drastically reduced, and I've been thinking about how I can keep enjoying thrifting without making foolish buys. 

Being more mindful must be part of it, and I've also decided to put a certain amount of cash into a special billfold that’s just for garaging. What’s there now is for the first four months of the year. If any is left, I’ll add it to the next four months’ worth, and so on. We’ll see how it works!

The bottom line? Spent $931 for the year, with a retail value of about $13,820. Even with all those donations, you can't complain about my return on investment!

And so we head into a new garaging year, which so far has been about what you would expect in the middle of winter! KK and I went to the bins the other day, where I spent four bucks on a cashmere sweater and one of these Copco 3-tier pantry organizers. It inspired me to purge and straighten my pantry – big improvement!

And we found one estate sale, where I bought a couple of pretty linen dish towels. (Okay, they ARE a weakness!) 

When I got home I realized they had not been hemmed, 

but that was an easy job, and I got to play with some of the fancy stitches on my sewing machine. 

Probably no one will ever notice the stars, but I know they’re there.