Serendipity Sales

I'm writing this while sitting on the "new" office chair I got at a garage sale. Eight bucks. It was priced at ten, I offered seven and here it is.Very comfy. Garage sales are some of my favorite things in the world. I call them Serendipity sales because that means "making desirable discoveries by accident."

My two favorite things that I've gotten at garage sales are a 25 cent plastic mixing/measuring bowl I use almost everyday and an armoire that closely matches the one we bought at an antique store for $350.00. I paid twenty dollars for this one.

My mom was the queen of garage sales and she taught me all I know, although she would never bargain.  I'll always ask. What can they say, "No"? Then I either buy it at their price or not. I once had a garage sale and a lady came who wanted to bargain over everything! If it was priced a dime she wanted it for a nickel.  I swear, if I had offered it for free she would have asked me to pay her to take it. You don't have to be obnoxious, lady!

My mom always wanted to get out there early, like  seven a.m. "If you don't go early there's no point in going." Somehow when she was still going strong at one p.m. and I was dragging behind her it escaped her that it was no longer early at the sales we still hadn't gotten to.

She always knew the best places to go and she could spot a good sale from half way down the street.  If people were leaving it with their arms loaded she would say "Hurry, they're getting all the good stuff!" and if people were leaving without buying anything she would say "Prices must be too high." and she was usually right.

It is hard to judge the quality of a sale if nobody else is there when you get there.  Like the time my mom and I went up onto a driveway and started looking through all the stuff.  It wasn't organized very well but I found some really cool hedge trimmers I wanted, although they didn't have a price on them. So I asked the guy how much he wanted for them and he just looked at me kind of funny.  Who knew he was just cleaning out his garage? He didn't want to bargain with me either.

Garage sales can actually be kind of habit-forming, maybe like gambling. I knew a woman once---I swear, I'm not making this up---who spent her whole pregnancy at garage sales, got so many cute outfits her husband had to add racks in the baby's closet and when she had baby showers, she returned the big stuff, like the stroller, pac 'n play and a bunch of other things to the store and re-purchased the same things at garage sales for about 1/10 the price. I thought she was pretty smart but her husband finally said she was addicted and made her stop. For awhile.

You can't really go to garage sales looking for specific things. That may be what's fun about it; you never know what you are going to find. Once, though, when Josh and Jerilyn were moving into a rental house that was so small there was only one drawer in the kitchen, I prayed for a hanging pot rack as I was walking up to a sale and there it was, beautiful, brass and only eight dollars!  It was the only time before or since I've seen one at a garage sale.

My kids and Dennis make fun of me sometimes about garage sales, forgetting that half of what they are using in this house is from garage sales and almost all the Christmas decorations.  Besides, if I buy something I can't use, I'll have a garage sale and sell it.