Tag Sale

Both hubby and I are truly excited! We are seeing our favorite colors cropping up. Yellows, vibrant greens, oranges and pinks. Oh, not the tulips, daffodils and crocus, although we LOVE the flowers too. I’m talking about garage sale signs. They are starting to appear on corners and front lawns.

We were able to go to a few sales last weekend, although some social activities prohibited us from doing it ‘full-time.’ But we are getting ready and so should you. If you are a collector of antiques, like to find bargains on clothes for the family, need practical items for a new apartment or preparing for a college dorm, this is a great time of year. Folks are cleaning out their garages and basements, checking over used items and seeing if they are still needed. Plus, we all know the condition of our economy and every dollar counts.

Before you rush out the door, I have a few suggestions. Consider this advice from an ‘old pro’ who has been hunting for many, many years. You probably have some ideas of your own, but here are a few absolute need-tos:

1.One of the best things you can do is get your car prepared. Gas up the night before. Put a few boxes in the back and fill ‘em with newspapers (not all people who run a sale have a clue that things need to be packed well. Or they have some pretty old paper that you’d rather not use.)

2. Stop at the bank the day before and get some smaller bills and change. Not only is it helpful to the sellers when you have the right amount for them, but sometimes it can work to your advantage. Let’s say an item is marked $7. You have $5’s in your pocket or purse and say “would you take $5?” Many times, seeing the money is encouragement enough. It’s almost as if you would have to make an effort to find the difference and hey, it’s right out there in front of them!

3. Be ready to negotiate, but please be polite. If an item is well-worth the tagged price, you can still ask if they can do any better. But if not, go ahead and pay full price. That’s right, it is much better than passing on principle and losing out on a treasure! In most cases, sellers expect you to ask and have priced things accordingly. Do they really expect you to pay $12 for an old print or are they thinking – it’s worth $10 so there is some wiggle room? But ask nicely, never insult them. Both sides like to think they are winning, so consider their feelings. It is often to your advantage to buy multiple items. By bringing a group up to the check-out table, you will have a bit of leverage and oftentimes, they will discount further than intended because of the number of items.

4. Be prepared by keeping a ‘needs list’ in your car. This can have things such as measurements for linens you need, the size of a print you may want to put into a picture frame, names of books you are looking for, etc. You can also put together a listing of items you already have. Let’s say you collect Roseville, you want to know which pieces you have and those you want to add to your grouping. Hubby always carries a clip-board with dimensions and is constantly on the look-out to find things such as glass shades for our older bridge lamps, sizes of door knobs to upgrade our hardware, etc.

5. Although we all like to get to as many sales as we can in our allotted time, if you come across a worthwhile sale, one with a lot of items of interest, don’t be afraid to stay for a while. You can dig deep, and perhaps find a treasure under the table (folks often put heavy items such as dish sets there because of the weight.) If you find one of your ‘addictions’, don’t be afraid to ask if they have any more of it. Many times, they just might have more and will go inside to dig it up. Or they’ll take your phone number and will call when they find it (it’s always good to get their number, but some people are reluctant to share that.)

6. Getting a list together is also important. Your local papers will have a section on rummage/garage/estate sales and you often get a sampling of their ‘wares.’ It will have times of the sale and locations. Many now state “no early sales” and we try to respect that. And your GPS can be your new best friend! By entering in the locations, you can efficiently go from sale to sale and accomplish more than you expected.

7. If you are the seller, have fun! We have a sale once a year and try to enjoy ourselves. Hubby often wears a tie and a ridiculous hat and we chat it up with the customers. Remember, the longer they stay, the more likely they are to buy things, or even tell others of the ‘fun couple’ at that yard sale down the street.

It takes a lot of patience to be a ‘rummager’, you do have to kiss a lot of frogs before that prince appears. But I have found it to be worth it and have bought some incredible items. I’d love to hear of your tales of the road – happy hunting season!  

I don’t collect furniture for the same reason that I don’t collect elephants or car tires. I don’t know what to feed either one once I’ve got ‘em home. Also, all of these things are typically really big.

Regardless of my ‘the smaller the better’ rule of collecting, I can’t help but be attracted to various items of practical home decor during my tag sale adventures. We got an early start this year, as April had a few warm weekends and my town was itching to get rid of a winter’s worth of stuff. With the sudden influx of inside-stuff being cluttered into outside-driveways, we set out to buy more stuff that other people didn’t need anymore, but neither did we. Anytime it looks like a house puked all over its own driveway, we’re there wading through it.

I didn’t think that any item of furniture could really beat last year’s collapsible table. While compact and narrow, the table’s lid opened up to reveal a nice bit of inside storage, and then telescoped out in two directions to expose three more areas that would be perfect for paintbrushes, sketches, pencils, and all manner of creativeness. For about ten bucks, I carted it home, glued back on a broken handle, and added it to the growing mess of studio furniture. At that point, the studio was comprised of a stack of metal film cabinets that the library was throwing out, and a set of miniature drawers that I found on the side of the road one day, and had very obviously been painted for a little girl’s bedroom. I didn’t change a thing. Give me anything with a lot of little compartments or drawers or sectionalized storage and I’m in heaven.

This year’s first tag sale was near the end of my own street. Unlike the rest, it wasn’t listed in the Pennysaver, which I usually use to plan the weekend’s hunt. Not only was it unlisted, but it bore a sign saying ‘OPEN EVERY DAY 9-4′, which was an unusual (and slightly unnerving) schedule for the typical tag sale, which is sadly relegated to weekends. We arrived at the end of a long dirt road and found an open garage, but no one around to inquire about prices. After about 5 minutes of delicately walking around tables of old Christmas decorations and about two dozen plush Garfields and Grimms, I had a handful of Batman pins and a nesting doll in the likeness of Santa Claus. An old German man emerged from the door adjoining the house to the garage, greeting us.

He seemed as perplexed by his wares as we were, quietly poking through things and explaining to us ‘I don’t don’t vhat the hell ees this’, or grabbing something dusty from a box and trying to charm us with it. He would give me the handful of eight Batman pins for free with a purchase of anything else. He was one of those tag-salesmen that really wants you to buy something, buy somehow, he wasn’t bothering me with his subtle enthusiasm. That’s when we spotted the Game Table.

It’s a short, cubical thing with four drawers, and inside each drawer is a game board for a different game : tic tac toe, chinese checkers, backgammon and chess, cleanly painted into the bottom of the wood. In the case of the chinese checkers, divots were carved for marbles to rest. Baggies of game pieces were there, and the thing was made of a solid, heavy wood. I didn’t know if I’d use it for games (it almost seemed like a travesty not to), but I did know that it had four flat drawers, and I painted a lot of flat things that had nowhere to live.

It’s dangerous when I start imagining purposes for things, because that’s when my judgment disappears and I’ll pay almost any price to give the object of my desire the ability to live out its destiny with me. As far as I was concerned, the game table and I had already grown old together. I’d already carelessly left rings on it from ill-placed cans of Dr. Pepper, and stubbed my toe on it at least three times.

The price, aside from three injured future-toes, was five bucks. After it was hefted out of the driveway and loaded into the car, we realized that this season’s tag sale bar had been set way too high. Where do you go after a game table and a handful of Batman pins?

We’re not too sure, but it’s going to be fun to find out.

Every Friday afternoon, after I get home from work and remove my boots, I have The Ritual. I grab the local Pennysaver and leaf through it, eyes trained to see anything with the words ‘estate’, ‘moving’, ‘tag’ and ’sale’ in conjunction. I don’t care about the puppies you’re giving away, or the fact that you can watch my children in a firm yet loving manner…. I want to buy your garbage.

It was only last year that I was still assigned to work every weekend, all day, at my job in the library. I mean, I’d been doing so for the previous seven or eight years I’d been in servitude there, but driving past the hot pink MULTI-FAMILY TAG SALE signs every day on the way to work became too great a temptation. I couldn’t spend one more summer inside while LPs baked in driveways across my town, so I took advantage of a personnel change to make my Big Scheduling Move… and I escaped.

So on Fridays, I speed through the Pennysaver, hoping that my vague sense of direction will lead me in the general vicinity of both listed and unlisted tag sales and their secret treasures, demarcated by signs stapled to the occasional telephone pole. While my rural area is light on traffic, it also does not have the benefit of any kind of organization or urban planning where street location comes into play. The denizens of the 18th century were not concerned with traffic flow as much as snakebites and dysentery. Despite the semi-chaotic and labyrinthine organization of the town, we do benefit from creaky old houses with mysterious furniture items, and the mass emigration of kids going to college and never coming back, leaving old action figures and video games behind.

So, we have roads that I’ve never heard of – either because they’re off of 15 other roads I’ve never heard of, or because they just sprung up in the last 5 years due to heavy developing and deforestation. This is where I always thrill to the wonders of the internet, and particularly, the miracle of GoogleMaps. Sure, I use Mapquest to get a general set of directions when I’m driving a long distance, but for weekly tag sales, GoogleMaps enables me to enter vague place names and it’ll always pinpoint what I’m looking for. Not only does it locate every road I need in a handy zoomable interface, but detailed satellite photography allows me to check for landmarks along the way. Since GoogleMaps pulls its images directly from government satellite data, they can get pretty detailed in some areas. For some reason, the US government took a particular interest in my upstate New York town, and possesses satellite maps that are detailed enough to show how many cars are in my driveway. For some reason, there’s almost no detail whatsoever on a town like Woodstock, NY. I’d think that Big Brother would want to keep an extra close eye on such a free-thinking location, epicenter of the biggest insurgence of the rock ‘n’ roll menace known to man… so it makes me wonder what, exactly, makes our town so scrutable. With modern technology, however, no tag sale escapes my grasp.

Usually, it’s a leisurely pursuit, punctuated by lots of U-turns in cul-de-sacs and iced coffees in the front seat, taking pleasure in small and coincidental finds. Last week, I found an old Game Boy in mostly-working condition that I plan on refurbishing or destroying entirely and sticking in the chest of a robot, and a heavy armload of 78s for a quarter apiece (which happened to be at the house of the first person who ever came out to me in high school). I’ve never encountered any signs of competition or avarice… until yesterday morning.

He drove a little red car, which he left idling roadside while be browsed the wares at the tag sale. That environmental inconsiderateness should have been the first indication that he wasn’t a very nice man, but the fact that he tried to race me to a tall, pink armchair I was looking at, and sat down in it while I was inspecting the fabric, compounded it. The game was on. Once I decided to let him have the armchair to himself, I moved over to a box of LPs, hoping to find something listenable. Unfortunately, he honed in on me again and decided to sing loudly into my ear as he was browsing the next box of LPs over, and then stick his sweaty bald head under my armpit as I was flipping through the box I had claimed, still singing offkey. Clearly, I had met my match, my patience versus his passive-aggressiveness, and my mood was soured by the audacity of the invasion, so I left without purchasing anything, while he loudly gloated about his collection of ten thousand records to whoever happened to be around. Which I hope fall on him, ’cause those things are heavy.

A bit later on, that negative encounter was negated as my mom and I were sitting in the car, determining our next move. Coming towards us was a truck with a table strapped to the top of it, upside-down, clearly piloted by a happy customer from one of the tag sales further up the road. As he drew closer, it was apparent that the table was not in fact a typical dining table, but a foosball table, and unable to restrain ourselves (despite our own desire for such an artifact), we cheered for his find and gave him a thumbs up as he passed, which he gleefully returned.

It’s not only the killer finds, which for me included a wooden sewing kit table that blossoms open to reveal a myriad of hidden compartments, and a vintage cardboard record holder, but it’s the encounters and the experience. We were schooled by an autistic teenager, wildly enthusiastic about his music, about when punk music REALLY started (though I chose not to buy his unwanted Vanilla Ice CDs), and we found an out-of-the-way barbecue restaurant that we’ll have to return to when the thought of barbecue in the hot sun isn’t immediately nauseating.

Next weekend, I’ll be in NYC covering the Big Apple Comic Con and the MOCCA Art Festival, so stay tuned!