Holy Moly Garage Sales

Today was my neighborhood’s coordinated garage sale day.  Such an awesome idea!  A couple of our neighbors printed up fliers and put them in everyone’s door that Saturday May 19th was the neighborhood day to do garage sales, and it worked!  DeForest and I spent about 3 hours today going to something like twenty garage sales around the neighborhood, and I found some great loot.

Great lightweight heavy-duty padded case for $5.  This will end up holding ALL my Dominion cards when the expansions finally stop coming out (~April 2013).  I think all I have to do is make four dividers to go down the middle (the padding will be taken out).  Then all the rulebooks will fit nicely behind the screen in the top, which pops out, and the tokens and little game boards will fit in the pockets in that screen.  Sweet!

Michigan t-shirt: $0.25.  Fo realz.  It fits pretty well and is a nice cheery yellow color.  🙂

Charcoal grill for $5!  DeForest and I had been muttering about getting a grill so that we could take the heat of cooking outside during the hot summer months, and now we can!  All we need to do is buy a bag of charcoal and scrape the daylights out of this thing to clean it up.

Candle holder (…because I need more of those?) and 11 wooden pictures frames with no glass.  Candle holder: $2; picture frames: $1.10.  Boo yeah.  Maybe I’ll finally get around to hanging up all my family photos now that I have a bunch of neat frames.

Perfect-sized travel bag: $5.  DeForest has a bag pretty much exactly this size, and I steal it all the time.  It fits an amazing amount in it (more than enough for a weekend trip, including several board games, of course), and fits underneath an airplane seat. Yay!  And I can pretend that “SI” stands for the international system of scientific units.

Bowls: $3.  I love the design on the sides, and I’m pretty sure that I’ll be using two of these as food/water dishes for the kitten (coming June 17th!).

Christmas bulbs: $3 for the assorted box, $0.10 for the other neat one, and $0.50 for an unopened box of hangers.

Four Terry Pratchett novels: $2.00.  I’ve never read his books, but I’ve been told my many people I respect that I would like them a lot.

Two onesies (for a friend): $1.00.  Five popsicle molds, two soft boiled egg dishes, and a wonderfully-sized pizza peel: $4.00.

Curtains: $1.00!  We finally got the curtain rod about a week ago, and our laziness in making the curtains has paid off.  They are actually twice the length as seen here, but DeForest doubled them and sewed the bottom to the top so they are double the thickness and fit out windows better.  Also, there are two curtains – one actually stretches the entire width, but we put both of them up there as we didn’t feel like cutting up the curtains.  They are actually handmade a long time ago by the person selling them at the garage sale, which is really neat!

Collapsible box: I forget… maybe $0.50?  I have four of these already, and they are really useful storage devices.

Amazing wooden box: $7!  It actually has a bunch of fishing doodads inside it – I’ll go through them another day and decide what I want to keep and what I should give to Uncle Mike or someone.  The box is really well-made and after some love cleaning it up will hold… something useful in my house.

Little Miss Sunshine: originally $2, but free with the “neighbor discount.”  Our neighbor Kat gave this to me for free, as she mostly wanted to get rid of some stuff and reminded me that I had given her an extra bookcase I had when I moved in.  I haven’t seen it yet, so I’m excited!  I’ve heard good things about this movie.

Four big plastic storage bins: $4 (that’s right – $1/bin).  These will help us in storing things in our shed behind our house, and in bringing things to Pennsic in August. Yay!  What an amazing deal.

Four folding chairs: $4.  We can now seat twelve people in our house if we bring out all the chairs, which is awesome for the big board game days we throw every couple months.  I got two folding card tables for $10 off Craigslist a few months ago, but didn’t really have the chairs to go with them.  Now I do!

DeForest also found four pairs of really nice children’s shoes in sizes his nephew can wear for $5 and four books he really wanted (including one that had been stolen from him last year) for under $2.  Woo!

All in all, we spent $54.45, plus $1.50 on some very tasty lemonade that kids were selling.  A lot of money to spend garage saling, but we sure did get a ton of amazing stuff.  🙂