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!

 

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!

SPREADSHEET TIME!

Hello, hello! Yes, I'm still here! Sorry about the long silence, but let’s just go ahead and blame it on 2020 along with so much else, right?

Actually, besides the dearth of sales and my inclination to keep myself separate, safe and healthy, I had a second knee replacement surgery in early October that put me out of commission for a while. Happy to say it went great, possibly even better than the first, and it's absolutely wonderful to be able to walk around without pain. And huge thanks go to my friend Marcia, who one again helped me through those first difficult days after surgery when I was hurting, grumpy and drugged!

Then there were almost no sales to go to, and the couple of estate sales I tried (run by well-regarded companies) were taking so few precautions for their customers that I decided not to participate for a while. I'm talking big crowds inside the houses, staff not wearing masks…as much as I love thrifting, it's not worth dying for, right?

But it is time for the annual spreadsheet review! Smaller numbers this year, but still had fun and found some great stuff. I can hardly believe I only spent $132.65 for the whole year. Three years ago that number was just under $1200. I brought home 111 items with an estimated retail value of about $2200. I'm happy with that kind of return on investment!

Crafting and gardening supplies are almost tied for the areas I spent the most ($27+ each). Picked up a few tools and several big pots for the thungbergia vines I plant to grow next summer. 

And under crafting came the twenty bucks for beautiful yarns that would have set me back well over $200 in a shop.

The category in which I brought home the most number of items was Entertainment, which included two dozen magazines to while away all the time this year I wasn’t going out and about. Most of them were even free, so the two bucks spent for the rest was well worth it. And I was able to share the gardening magazines with friends, so even more bang for the buck.

Best return on investment once again was clothing. Only brought home 13 pieces for $9.25, but they would have set me back over $600 in a store. Let’s face it, you just can't beat fifty cent jeans and brand new shirts! And I had a lot of fun improving this linen Coldwater Creek jacket (narrowed the collar and shoulders, added contrasting accents, better buttons).

One of the upsides to reduced garaging was a drastic reduction in my ‘category of shame’ Donations – those things I bring home then decide not to keep. Only four this year!

I was recently reading my earlier year-end-roundup posts and came across this line:

No matter what else happens, I can always look back at my garaging record and say without doubt that it was a very good year!

And I have to say, even in notoriously-awful 2020 that still holds true. I'm safe and healthy, my wonderful pets are all well and making me laugh, and the garaging was fun and worthwhile – as is the spreadsheet I've maintained now for fifteen years. That's a lot of memories and personal history.

In fact, my garaging spreadsheet inspired me this year to create one for another endeavor – my yard makeover. I've never been successful in keeping a garden journal; I tried a few times but it never lasted. But this year I started listing tasks I needed to complete in a spreadsheet, with a column for completion date and notes on the project. Instantly I had a to-do list as well as a list of accomplishments. Then I added another page for bloom times, and another for expenses. I'm not sure I really wanted to know I've spent almost $130 on DIRT since I moved here a couple of years ago (I mean, dirt!). But that’s offset by seeing the great deals I've found on garden tools and pots by shopping on driveways. 

And just like the satisfaction I get from the garaging spreadsheet, I'm amazed to see that I planted 184 things in 2020! (Okay, yes, I had some fabulous help, especially from friends Lysa and Briana!) Some are in the ground, some were in pots and my window boxes, but (so far!) most are still alive.

The end of 2020 will not bring instant change to the troubles of the world, as much as we might want it to. But I feel hopeful for good things in 2021, and I know that for me, some will be very thrifty and fun to find. I hope that’s in your future, too! 

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.