Confessions of a Junkie

So... confession time I am a TOTAL junkie... Garage Sale Junkie that is! I LOVE IT!  The rush of running around town, never knowing what treasure is laying around the corner. What amazing deal I might score today.  I call it treasure hunting and I am doing all I can to get my kids hooked on it too.

On Friday and Saturday mornings during Garage Sale Season we'll wake up early have some fruits and juice in the car and head out on our treasure hunts.  Fridays I just have Bells and Saturdays all three of the monsters are riding along.  Some weekends the kids nag the whole time and I'll have to blast the tunes to drown them out (totally kidding... well only half kidding lol!), others they find great treasures and are so glad their mama dragged them out.  I do make a decent amount of money out of my treasure hunting by reselling things on ebay, but a lot of the money "made" for my family by garage sale shopping comes by way of how cheap we are able to buy the things we want/need for the home and family.  I am adamant about second hand shopping, with all the things already out there in the world there is NO REASON to add to the waste and buy new (except the obvious items for hygienic reasons).  That is why I love my ebay business, I take things that one person didn't want and might have discarded and find them a home again with someone who does want them, keeping junk out of land fills and putting some food on the table and maybe paying the light bill at the same time.

Sure we might have to wait a little longer to find the item we are looking for secondhand vs the immediate gratification of running out to Target and buying it now... but if you are patient and flexible (have a color pallet vs a single color for something in mind) and don't mind some "character" (a little scuff or scrape) you can almost always find what you want for ridiculously less than you would have paid new, and there will be ZERO packaging (unless you had it shipped) and NOTHING added to the landfills.


Anyway this this weekend has been a KILLER weekend for us!  I did score some great stuff to flip on ebay for some bucks but we also found some pretty kick ass deals on things we have been wanting/needing for around the house.   So I thought I'd share some of the deals we found:

Hubs found this super tall extension ladder that we have been in dire need of for $10! Now he can clean the rain gutters and put up the Christmas lights this winter without me fretting for his safety.

Speaking of winter I scored these Sorel boots for my husband for a DOLLAR, yea a BUCK!  Come on!  Yes they are leather and sheepskin... yes I am vegan.  I am also realistic in knowing that buying or not a used product that has already been purchased will do nothing to help save any animals or prove any points to manufacturers with my spending dollars.  But for a dollar they will keep my husbands feet warm this winter.

Gabriel needed a new desk chair for the desk in his room, they were asking $8 for this chair but said everything was half off (They REALLY wanted to sell their crap!!) Sure it's orange... but it's going in a 9 year old's room who cares!  It was $4!

The same half off garage sale had this desk marked at $40 making it $20.  My son Brandon has a kiddy desk just like this one in his room and will be out growing it in the very near future.  At which point it will go to Bella and he will be in need of a big boy desk (Thinking ahead SAVES!)

Bella planted a little garden along our front walk so she was searching the sales for little knick knacks to stick in her garden.  Daddy found her this little guy who reminded us of Lowly Worm for a buck, and she can even plant a tiny plant in his little tree stump!

Another find for her garden was this little pagoda house she also found for a $1, it's supposed to be a solar light and the guy said it would work if we put new batteries in it.  We like it just the way it is :)

I found a patriotic doormat to grace our porch this summer for a buck as well.

And Daddy found the hose hidey thingy he has been looking for to make the ugly hoses in front of the house "go away"  I think he paid $10 for that.

A few little decor knick knacks I picked up for .50 cents each

Manly stuffs Daddy has been needing... he bundled these together for $15 for both items.  He's a bundle master too like Frank... if you watch American Pickers you gotta know how to bundle!! ;)

A trash can... YES... A trash can.  We have been wanting to put together a compost bin for a while now but did not want to put more than $10 into it.  We saw the ones at Costco for $100 and thought no friggen way... we can do that for pennies!  Our first thought was those blue plastic drums people use as rain barrels but for some reason those are like gold around here and hard as heck to find.  So then I thought... ok a trash can would work, went to Home Depot... Holy Hell THEY ARE EXPENSIVE!  So we have been waiting and pondering and waiting... yesterday at the 1/2 off garage sale this was marked for $3 it's clean inside and is full of unused black garbage bags, that alone makes it worth the $1.50 then the guy says "take it for a buck."  OK!  Compost bin here I come!!!  Patience PAYS!!!

This one is my find of the week! SOOOOO excited about this buy!  EZ UP shade canopy for our deck.  We have bounced around the idea of spending hundreds on a gazebo like this but they were all square and honestly we didn't want to spend that much money.  Yesterday a guy had this canopy up at his yard sale,  I assumed he was using it for shade as they almost always are but then I overheard him say to another shopper that he was moving to Maine and not taking anything with him.  So I asked "are you taking the canopy with you?"  "Nope he says, give me $15 bucks and it's yours."  SOLD!!!  When we got it home it turned out to be the PERFECT size for the space we wanted to shade on the deck, we lashed it down so the wind won't pick it up and we kicked back and enjoyed the shade!! Now I need to find some of those corner plant stand things and a few other odds and ends to pull the deck together and give it that "my corner of the world" feeling.

Planning ahead SAVES!!  I like my kids to wear cute clothes and there was a time (only a couple years ago) when all I did was pay disgustingly high prices mainly at Gymboree or Gap (I am a TOTAL GYMBO addict!) for clothes for my kids.  There are times when I will have a moment of weakness when the outfit in the window is just TOOOO darned adorable to pass up or the sale prices are ridiculously low that you will find me in Gymboree.  But now for the most part garage sales and the occasional ebay lot are my fix and if I shop a size or two ahead of where the kids are now I can almost always keep them in top brands for next to nothing.  And the kicker is that there is such a high demand for secondhand Gymbo, TCP, GAP, Old Navy etc... that as long as I take care of the clothes when the kids out grow them I can sell them at my own garage sale and get back darn near what I paid for them.  Yesterday I scored a stack of tops and pants for Bella.  They are size 5 and she is only in 3s and 4s right now, also they are all long sleeves and warm pants and we are just getting in to summer so I imagine most people in my place would not even wasted their time looking at them.  I thought "When next winter rolls around these will be perfect for her"  They were Gymbo and Total Girl which is a JCP brand all in great shape and I got 8 items for 2 bucks!  Are you kidding me!! Hell yea, I'll store them for a couple months until they fit her :)

I found this little doo-dad for a quarter and it will do just the trick of keeping Bella's hats, belts and scarves off the floor.

Earlier this week we took Bella to Cat Tales a local big cat rescue just outside of town.  They have two white tigers named Apollo and Zeus and Bells was enamored with them, Apollo grumbled at Daddy but Bella still loved him.  So the minute we pulled up to the sale with this big guy she would not leave his side, APOLLO!!!!  They wanted $8 for him and would not budge a cent!  I tried to get him for $5 but they weren't haven't it, not $6, not $7... and I wasn't getting Bella away from there without him so now $8 APOLLO is our house mascot <3

My son Brandon is my little skater dude, so when he saw these skate ramps at a sale this morning he was STOKED... only problem they wanted quite a bit more than he could afford.  The kids have their own money from their chores and he had a rough idea about how much he had to spend.  They wanted $40 for the ramps which included a brand new in the box grind rail.  I teach the kids that when it comes to making offers on items "it never hurts to ask, the most someone can do is say no, or counter you back with a different price." Brandon had about $20 to spend which was a big drop from what they were asking but when a little dude comes up to you and says "I have $20 from my allowance and I really like the skate ramps" most people tend to bend :)  I know I did when I was having my own sale (when it came to kids spending their own money).  I would have been willing to kick in a few bucks if the guy had said $25 or maybe $30 but he was a skater type dude himself so I think he thought it was rad that they were going to a little skater dude.  So as you can see $20 later I have one happy little dude and one brave dudette!

For the $20 he got both of the black ramps and the grind rail, I added the boards to go across from some boards we have in the garage, we'll probably figure out something better eventually but for now this worked out ok.

Lil Skater Chick!

Told him to practice tricks and balancing on the rail over the grass first for a while to make mama feel better!

This was another killer deal FIVE bucks!!  It's HUGE!!  The lady I bought it from lives up on the prairie where the winds are ferocious so it was more trouble to her than it was worth, but I have been wanting to up my Christmas arsenal and summer time garage sales are just the place to do that!!  

Another silly Christmas find.  He was only $1.50 I couldn't resist!

You see he looks like any innocent Christmas tree....

RAWR!!  But he's not!! He's a talking, singing, caroling tree and he is motion activated... which means I get to bring a little Halloween scare into my Christmas cheers when I stake this guy out on my porch this year!!

Little skater dude is also Star Wars OBSESSED and mama scored these ships at a sale on Friday for $3 each for him!

And finally Gabriel is just as OBSESSED with Giraffes as Brandon is with Star Wars he has quite the collection and has been begging me FOREVER to buy him a giraffe Pillowpet and I have flat out refused.  Well today he not only found one, he found the JUMBO one... you know the one they want SIXTY bucks for on TV... for a buck.  He was THRILLED!

Oh... and lest you think my home is destined for an episode of Hoarders we do a yearly purge and have our own garage sale.  We actually JUST had ours it was MASSIVE! Our community sale is known in all the neighboring towns and they bring in porta-potties, and the crowds of people are so thick I couldn't see across the street to my neighbors house most of the weekend... people drive around on their ATVs or in their little golf carts... Lots of folks pulling wagons.  It was great and we purged!  AND we made almost $1,500!  Most of which was from top brand, clean, and well displayed kids clothes, TONS of toys, my daughter's entire collection of Little People (it was HUGE), and our DVD collection we decided we didn't need cluttering up our life anymore... we cleared out a TON of stuff.  I was too busy with the selling to think about taking pictures when we had our sale. I did take one pic, this was the table with all of Bella's Little People stuff on it because first thing in the morning I thought "Oh I should put a Craiglist ad to tell people I have all these Little People things here for sale today, people are crazy for them, I know we were..." and then BAM! We were slammed with shoppers and I didn't give it a second thought.

So what do you think?  Killer deals huh?  Did you hit any garage sales this weekend?  What were your scores?