The Practical, the Delightful, the Bottom Line

Genie was kind enough to leave a comment on my last post which included a request for the 2023 spreadsheet report, which reminded me I’d never done it! I realized during the year that most of my finds fall into two categories. They are either practical (Pragmatist is my middle name. Hmmm, would that make me Queen Pragmatist of Fifty Cents?) or I find them delightful.

I much prefer the word ‘delight’ to the word ‘joy’; it seems to carry less responsibility, less necessity to work at maintaining it. Delight can be ephemeral and yet no less delightful, and as long as I still view something with that sense of delight I will keep it. If the delight fades, I tell whatever it is goodbye. Makes it easier to pack it off to the Humane Society Thrift Store, where I hope someone else will experience delight. Which of course brings up my donations category – 30 items I bought didn’t make the long-term cut. $44.25 spent…but hopefully will bring in more than that and feed some puppies and kitties.

The single most lucrative category (best return on investment) surprised me because it was such a small one – reselling. I bought only two things to resell, paid a buck and a half for them, and after all expenses they made $60.71 on eBay. I wish all my investments were that robust. Sheesh. What were they, you ask? A vintage bar of soap 

and a silk Citron Santa Monica dress.

Household goods had the next best return on investment – found 13 items for $17.55, worth about $390. As you’d expect, these are things that fall squarely in the practical camp. Fifty cents for a 3-way lightbulb that retails for $12. (Twelve bucks for one lightbulb! Lord have mercy.) A $2 jug of laundry soap that lasted 3.5 months. Nearly new king size all-cotton sheets for a dollar each. You would not believe the thrill I get making the bed with a beautiful blue sheet that cost a dollar.

One of the best household things I found all year is both practical and delightful – a fireplace screen. But wait, you say, there is no fireplace in your house. True, but this is the best doggy gate I have ever used. Never, ever thought of using one this way before.

I found several useful pieces of clothing, the cream of the crop being three Land’s End turtlenecks from a free box. I wear t’necks constantly in the winter, and these are the good heavy ones that are hard to find these days. I bought 12 pieces of clothing and accessories for $12, including this classy vintage purse that’s been fun to carry.

The category in which I found the most items was yard stuff. I saw an article in a (garage sale) gardening magazine about someone who used fancy vases upside down on stakes in their garden. Once you embrace upside-down-on-a-stake, you find all kinds of possibilities on driveways. For both the fancy part and the stake – curtain rods make great stakes, often with interesting finials. My favorite concoction used a $1 curtain rod (originally white, I painted it with copper spray paint) with a $3 pair of glass pendant shades. 

I had an open garden in June, and visitors had a lot of fun spotting all my décor.

Altogether I had a pretty darned good year – spent a total of $310.55, with an estimated value of $4826. It still pays to shop on driveways!

 

A Million Thanks

Early last Saturday morning something momentous happened on my blog.

There’s a good chance you’ve never noticed the counter at the very bottom of the page. It sits there quietly adding a digit every time someone visits my blog. And early on Saturday morning, someone visited and the counter ticked over to…one million.

Now, I know there are sites out there that hit that number in days, or even hours. Took almost 13 years here (next week is the blog anniversary). But for a site that has never advertised – or accepted an advertisement – and remains true to the focus on having a wonderful time paying the least you possibly can for practically anything, a million visits makes me very happy.

A million is big. A million hours equals a tad over 41,000 days. A million days is 2737 years, 10 months, 6 days and a few hours. The height of a stack of dollar bills would be as tall as a 30+ story building. (I'll take my share from the bottom, please!)

A million is a whole, whole lot. And of course I've never counted, but I bet I've had close to a million laughs and moments of satisfaction and amazement over what can be found when you go out thrifting. Whether you favor garage or yard sales, estate sales, rummage sales or thrift stores, the sheer entertainment value is priceless. And that's not even counting all the good stuff you can add to your life for a tiny fraction of a million dollars.

So I send a million thanks out to all who have come along on this journey for the past 13 years, with double thanks to those who have left comments.

And now let's get started on the second million!

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.

This is the Way it Was

Hooray, it's spreadsheet time! It's probably crazy how much I love looking at the past year through Excel, but it is so darned satisfying. And 2017? It was a very big year.

Bottom line? Spent $1197.50, my second highest year since I started the spreadsheet in 2005. The biggest year was put over the top by our Ekornes sofa, which would have retailed for about $4000. Well worth the money: comfortable, handsome, and the entire family (two people, two dogs, one cat) can sit in front of a fire crackling in the fireplace at the same time. 

A few steps away sits the item that put this year over the top: the large handmade bell I majorly splurged on back in July. We still ring it whenever we pass by. The splurge did not diminish my lifestyle, we still have enough to live on. I'm good with it.

That’s the spending part, but the next column on the spreadsheet is the fun one—the retail value. I’m conservative when I figure these, mainly because it's almost impossible for me to believe that people actually pay the prices I’m seeing when I look up what I've brought home. Like the Brooks Brothers Italian merino sweater I found for the hubster that would retail for right at $300. 

My price? Ten cents.

My “retail” total this year came to $21,490—an average of $18.20 value for every $1 spent. Yes, of course it is true that much of what I bought would never have entered my doors if I couldn’t buy it on a driveway. But let’s face it: there are many, many people who shop in malls the way I shop on driveways, and a lot of them have the credit card debt to prove it. I get to have the goodies and live without debt. Talk about a win!

It's fun to look at my individual categories too. All except for one: the donations category. Yup, all those things I bought that I decided not to keep. And there were a bunch this year, 70 in fact. (Hangs head in shame.) Half of them were things I bought for either crafting or décor. (A focus for 2018 will be to diminish that trend!) But even though it's a tad embarrassing to make what turn out to be buying mistakes, the total cash outlay was a little over $60, the stuff was donated to the kitty rescue that provided us with Millie, and hopefully it will help at tax time.

Clothing continues to have the highest return on investment, and this was an amazing clothing year, mainly thanks to the estate sale that spanned the first two weekends in February. The sale where I spent about ninety bucks total (which is like a zillion dollars when you are the Queen of Fifty Cents) but brought home over $9000 worth of cashmere and silk and more. 

Hardly a day has passed since then that I am not wearing something from that sale. KK and I often greet each other with, “Is that a Katherine you’re wearing?” (Katherine was the artist whose estate was being sold.) I'm still astounded by that sale, and positive it will be a once-in-a-lifetime event. And so grateful that I got to experience it.

To make it even sweeter, the Pendleton white raven blanket I found at that sale resold for over $300, thus paying not only for that sale but also for about a quarter of my garaging year!

After clothing, craft and sewing items are a biggie and have led to a lot of fun this year. I've made several Welsh-smock style shirts to wear over my cashmere sweaters and keep them unspotted, and tried my hand at textile jewelry. 

My little Dancing Bunny art quilt hangs over my sewing machine. 

I even used thrifted thread and cloth to repair a travel dog crate of mesh and ripstop nylon when family visited last summer for the amazing solar eclipse. Now that was an interesting mending project! (Of course, Millie was a huge help as always.)

Every year I swear I'm going to lay off the décor items, and every year I bring more home (as noted above in the donations!). But…I love the things I kept! As long as something makes me smile whenever I look at it, I will continue to consider it priceless.

And admit it—you would have taken home an armload of those Steiffs too, right?