The Story of the Blue Big Ben

My friend who is Cambodian was born on Cambodian New Year, also known as April 13. Saturday, I went with him to Chicago's Khmer New Year's celebration.
Buddhist call and response monotone chanting, hundreds of Styrofoam bowls filled with incredibly delicious curries and noodles and foods without translations, monks in orange and women in traditional Cambodian dress and children in their parents' arms--it was wonderful.

Then it was estate sale-ing time. I was creeping dangerously close to full-blown migraine and I knew I should have said, "Sorry, we'll go tomorrow or some time when I'm feeling better," but we were going treasure hunting to find him his birthday present from me and I didn't want to let him down. I found the three estate sales closest to my house, printed out a very explicit map, and we climbed into the car.

The first two sales yielded nothing noteworthy. As we drove to the third, I had big flashy blind spots in my vision freaking me out and making driving dangerous and terrifying. Meanwhile I learned my friend can't read a map and has absolutely no sense of direction, so I can't hand off navigation duties. By the time we arrived at the last sale, I was ready to vomit, explode, and curl up into a little ball on the lawn for at least an hour.

But I went in.

It was a moving sale, and different members of the family sold their things in separate areas on the first floor. Almost immediately my friend found a gorgeous quilt from the 1920s. He talked them down from $35 to $25. Wow. He took it home with him so I didn't get to inspect it or research it or anything, but happy happy birthday!
In the nephew's corner, I dug through a box of silk designer ties. A lot of them were beautiful-to-gaudy and apparently from the early 1990s. Fabulous as they were, I knew I couldn't sell them on Etsy for at least another year unless undid the seams and used the painted silk for something else...but this is why I have too many projects going, so I restrained myself and left the ties.

I didn't leave the bag drawer pulls or the blue Big Ben alarm clock.

The white haired matriarchal-type had a whole collection of tabletop clocks: electric and wind-ups and alarms, many in working condition and all predating my existence. She had an emotional attachment, I had a budget, so I had to pick a single favorite. In Migraineland, logic and analysis go out the window, so "Blue. Pretty." became my instant deciding factor and we raced home so I could crawl into a nice dark quiet bed and think happy garage sale-related thoughts until sleep ushered me through a few more hours of migraine.

Business Idea for Garage Salers

Like hitting all the garage and estate sales? Find thrifty, recycling-prone friends, neighbors, anyone nearby who will give you money, and have them give you their Target/Walmart/Home Depot/general household item shopping list.

I feel somewhat estranged from Target these days, going when I need toilet paper, razors, moisturizer, and as little else as possible. When my blender died, I found one at an estate sale. Picture frames and the hooks to hang them, a corkscrew, my drinking glasses, the scale I use to weigh packages--all things I picked up from garage and estate sales.

Not everyone has the time or inclination to scour the universe for a "perfectly good electric can opener," six matching wine glasses, and a chainsaw under $10.

But you do.

There's so much stuff out there. Then we keep producing and buying more stuff. There is a market within the capitalist system for the Professional Recycler.

Do other people's shopping for them, but at garage sales. Save them money. Charge a fee low enough that they still save money.

Go forth and thrive.

Story Time with JillHannah and Antique Rolling Pins

Whenever possible, I go to garage sales, estate sales, demolition sales, etc.

I've heard of storage unit sales, where you buy the entire contents of a unit abandoned by its owner, so when we drove up to one of the addresses on my list of sales from the classifieds and saw it was a storage facility, I got excited.

Apparently a woman with multiple units had died and her next of kin didn't want or didn't want to deal with what she'd left behind. There were units full of depression glass, dolls, toys, books, magazines, artwork, and an altogether overwhelming amount of stuff. I could have spent a week in there, but I came with friends who insisted on seeing sunlight and having lives, so I had to hurry.

A week or two before the sale at the storage unit, I'd been at an auction that included lot after lot of antique rolling pins that sold for hundreds of dollars. I think some serious collectors came out and got into a bidding war to inflate the price, but that still was fresh in my mind.

When I saw the barrel of rolling pins at the storage unit sale, I got excited. Fat, skinny, colorful, I bought them all. My friends thought I was nuts.

I kept getting them confused when I went to take photos, having trouble remembering which ones I'd done already, etc. So I gave them names. Names come with imagined stories, and now they have lives.


If I'm the crazy lady with too many cats (or dogs) who has afternoon tea with her antiques before I'm even 30, slap me. Hard.

You Little Twit

I'm trying to be a good little Twitter Twit again. Because someone told me to.

Yesterday I went to four (was it four? four sounds right...) estate sales. The best thing I got was the complete first season of Full House on DVD for $2. It's for my sister, who loved that show when we were growing up. She currently lives in Portland and doesn't read my blog so yapping about it in here won't ruin the surprise when the good people of the United States Postal Service deliver it to her door.

Full House for my sister, and a four-volume 1911 printing of Half Hours with the Best Humorous Authors for myself (the condition isn't good enough to sell, or that's what I keep saying so I have an excuse to keep it...I payed $5).

I'm trying to research this percolator thingy so I can actually list it:
This spring blue purse, too, but I don't know what it's called and i have woefully little information:

This morning, at an estate sale, I bought a Kitchen Aid mixer for $3. Yes, three dollars. It's little, it's older than I am, but it works. I could sell it...or I could have Kitchen Aid mixer. For $3.

I also went to a demolition sale. I wanted to buy all the knobs off of everything, but didn't. This house was beautiful. Why are they tearing down this house? So many nooks and corners to hide in, so much quality wood flooring. I wanted to take all the long, single beam wood hand rails from the stair cases and turn them into a crazy xylophone.

I'm much better at ideas than execution.

Showcase slot tomorrow. Am I ready? No!

Where to Screw Email

The Screw Email Blog lives! In my estate sale scavenging, I found two shoeboxes of letters and postcards for sale, postmarked and filled with abandoned story and sentiment. (I'm the only person at these sales who looks for non-blank cards.)
Now, I have over 100 cards, so I can keep the blog running for at least that many posts, and by then I figure it might actually catch on enough for people to be comfortable sending me things.
You are included in people.

As a result of my postcard shoebox purchases, I now also have a whole ton of blank vintage postcards, too. I figure I can sell five postcard grab-bags, but here's the question: do I sell them with all my other vintage finds on jillhannah.etsy.com or do I put them on Off the Wall Greetings because they are cards and a bit off the wall?
Suggestions? Inklings? Comments?

Chandelier!

I found a chandelier! For $90!

I went to an estate sale on Tuesday with no expectations and there it was, hanging in the garage. They had a bunch of other chandeliers and light fixtures and insane quantities of other crap, but mine was just there, hanging, being exactly what I needed and $90.

It was filthy. I thought a little late of taking "before" and "after" photos while I cleaned it off with a wet paper towel, but here you can see the "before" and "after" with the clean one on the left:


Now I still need to fix it up. It's missing some of its hanging crystals, and they don't seem to be the standard "u drop" ones I'm finding on Ebay. Plus whatever aparatus is required to go from socket to bulb, be it fake candle or something else. I just have no idea about that part. Then getting it wired into my actual ceiling...but considering I've put all of $90 into it so far and had feared/expected to sink at least $400, I totally win. Now I can still afford to slipcover my big armchair (probably in this fabric)!

Also at the fabulous estate sale: art. Tons and tons of art. Framed portraits of John Wayne and oils of houses and trees and things "handpainted in Taiwan" and prints of birds and a million other individual things that made no sense with the rest of it. It would take a person a solid day to look through it all, and I wished I knew more about the values of things. I'm sure a knowledgeable person could make a killing in there; maybe not Antiques Roadshow, but signed? numbered? original? crap? I ended up with three black and white scapes of Roman-looking ruins that clearly went together but were different sizes. There was a group of women (family, perhaps?) digging through the art with me and one of them noticed the scattered set. I modified my mental picture of my dining room walls to include the trio and decided to take them home. Here they are with my $6 Salvation Army and $10 garage sale mirrors:

Things are coming together quite nicely, I think.