Love is compromising. Happy Valentine’s Day!
SO JEALOUS.
I’ve been getting back into the estate sale swing the past few weeks and so far so good. No major scores, but definitely some interesting purchases that I haven’t come across before. Two weeks ago I went to a small sale that was advertised as having “man stuff.”
It was pretty packed and very dirty. There was only one room inside the house and a garage packed to the gills.
It was hard to take photos since there was only one room to shop in, and like 45 workers.
The items were normal-ish. Dude stuff like hunting gear, deer mounts, cheap fake swords, etc. There were tiny hints that this person maybe was crazy/an ahole.
How to Make Knives? Alright, maybe that’s a normal hobby. Idk.
I’ll typically excuse one Nazi book. But several Nazi books? Eh. Although, that said, I know some dudes are super into Nazi history as like a “hobby." Still seems weird to me.
I ended up buying a vintage AC/DC button for $2 because it was still attached to the Cobo parking ticket from the concert in the 70s. (I think it was the 70s, I forget.) Anyways, I thought this would sell on ebay but so far it hasn’t. TWO DOLLARS WASTED.
I also bought a giant box of crystals for $10. I found it in the garage and was sure that mice were living amongst all the newspaper that was being used as padding. When I was at home and unwrapping each gem, I would jump and shriek, sure that a mouse was about to reveal itself. Zach kept telling me to buck up but I was so freaked. There were no mice afterall, just mouse poop which is so effing gross.
You can’t tell from the photo but these crystals are HUGE. I am planning to put most of them on ebay. I am also planning to keep a few to use for meditation. I follow this adorable hippie mom on instagram and she does meditation with her baby. The crystals seem to be very important to the process. I even asked Timmy to get me some chakra crystals for Christmas and HE DIDN’T.
OK, let’s be honest, I will probably never meditate, but still, these crystals are COOL.
The last thing I bought was this psychedelic poster from the 1960s or 70s. It is up on ebay right now and is currently at $15 with 6 bids. I paid $2 for it. It is very majestic.
Sorry for the bad pic. I pulled it off ebay. That damsel in distress in the middle is me. I am very foxy.
-Erin
It was a lazy Sunday around our household today so Zach decided to throw some things up on Craigslist. He had a bunch of NES games from chidhood, and I had some leftover from a college boyfriend whose possessions pop up in random storage boxes around here from time to time.
There were 22 games in total which Zach decided to sell in one giant lot. I figured they were worth about $2 a piece, so I recommended asking $50 for all of them. We would then wait to be lowballed and accept that offer. Zach ended up asking $60 for all of them, but hoped someone would offer like $35.
Here is a photo of just 4 of them from the Craigslist ad. Perhaps if you’re a Nintendo collector, you will look at this photo and immediately know the road that this story is about to go down.
Anyway, I went and ran some errands, so what happens next is all Zach’s fault. He starts getting inundated with text messages and emails of people wanting to buy the games. There were literally 15 texts, emails, and calls within 20 minutes of the listing going up.
Now, call me crazy, but if it were me at the helm, my Spidey sense would be on overdrive.
One dude texted this:
You guys, Ortonville is OVER AN HOUR AWAY from our house! If the alarm bells weren’t ringing before, they are certainly blasting now. This guy was willing to drive an hour, in the snow, AND give us more money than we were asking for.
So after the games are sold, Zach has this little exchange:
WTF?! You’re telling me that Chip and Dale 2 is worth $150 ON ITS OWN. FFS. What kind of world…
Yep, sure enough:
I guess we (Zach) should’ve done our (his) homework. Basically this is a shout-out to all of you to go tear through your video game stash. If that stash only contains Xbox games though, you’re out of luck, as made evident by this guy:
-Erin
It’s been a slow year for us here at Dig This Treasure, at least when it comes to estate sales. Family life, on the other hand, has been off the charts. Sarah had baby Arden two months ago and he is now smiling and cooing like a champ!
Everett is now 14 months and walking/crashing into everything. He has recently mastered sitting in a chair and brushing his teeth.
As for treasure hunting, we don’t have a super awesome rundown of the year like we did in 2013 and 2012. Seriously, check those links out if you haven’t before.
Here, though, are some quick clicks to this year’s highlights:
Sarah unearths unseen Beatles footage
Zach picks up where we left off in the estate sale game
Erin and Zach visit a crazy digger sale
Friend Organ tips us off to the greatest ebay sellers of all time
Erin gets in a fight trying to protect Sarah
One of our more fun days out sale-ing
Sarah gets pulled over by the cops
Thanks for reading and cheers to 2015!!
-Erin
All that glitters isn’t gold, and apparently all that is purple isn’t actually, well, purple. The saga of my purple insulators sure has been a roller coaster ride–one that I am sad I ever had to ride on.
I had been in communication with the buyer of my insulators as soon as I sold them. He was super nice and I actually ended up sending him some other common insulators I had laying around. I checked in with him to make sure the package arrived safely and that he signed for it and blah blah. Then, I heard nothing.
A week passed and I felt comfortable spending the profit I made from this sale. I hadn’t heard anything to the contrary, so I figured the buyer must be happy with his new purple glass buddies.
And then I got the following ebay message:
I immediately felt ill. I knew this wasn’t good. F#$K F#$K F#$K. I was at my parents’ house when this happened and I seriously felt like I got punched in the stomach. It was that bad. I couldn’t breathe.
Because $425 is a lot of money, and I had just gone on a Christmas shopping spree :(
Andy was actually really nice when I finally spoke to him on the phone. I wanted to hate him. And I wanted to blame him for this whole ordeal or try and prove somehow that he was the one scamming me. I knew though that wasn’t true.
I should have realized something was up, because purple insulators are REALLY rare. For me to find THREE of them all together was like lightning striking me not once, not twice, but, yes, three times.
What I can blame Andy for was the fact that he had a hunch these insulators were irradiated. He kept saying on the phone that he was “taking a gamble” on them. To me, if you are knowingly taking a risk on something, then you are assuming some responsibility for the fallout. I felt as though Andy should’ve tipped me off that these might be tampered with. I could have pulled down the listing and done some investigating. Like my previous post, I did get tipped off by another ebay member, but he seemed really jackass-y about it. I didn’t believe him.
I guess I should have.
Anyway, Andy told me not to panic quite yet, as he still had to blacklight test the insulators. Irradiated insulators don’t glow under a blacklight because the xrays used to irradiate them have messed up the manganese composition of the glass (or something like this…you get the idea.) Andy also told me that I could refund him little by little if needed–that he wouldn’t be filing any claims with paypal or ebay.
While waiting for Andy to acquire a blacklight to test the insulators, I went ahead and sent photos to several insulator experts at the NIA (National Insulator Association). The decision was unanimous. Literally 6 different insulator experts (who knew the world had so many) said my insulators were irradiated.
I wanted to write back Dwayne Anthony and be like, “Damn. What a harsh and cruel blow you have delivered to me D.A. Can I call you D.A.?" Instead, I was all, "Bummer. Thanks.”
What is amazing about the NIA is that its Authentication & Classification Advisor, named Paul, offered to take up a collection among its members to help me cover my financial loss in buying these insulators originally. He was really impressed that I actually cared whether my insulators were irradiated and that I was refunding the ebay buyer.
I explained to Paul that only $4 was spent on the insulators when my parents originally bought them, so I wasn’t really out anything (EXCEPT MY AMAZING EBAY PROFIT, but I digress…)
Seriously, how nice is that? Insulator people might be the most boring collectors of all time, but they sure are nice as hell.
Ok so, let’s wind this up. The blacklight test went about as sh*tty as could be expected. My insulators didn’t glow. Andy sent me some photos:
That’s one of his legit purple insulators.
Here is one of my insulators:
WHOMP WHOMP. You win this round Andy.
And in the end, I still kinda won. Andy didn’t make me give him a full refund, just a partial one. He said because it is Christmas, and because, like he said, he was “taking a gamble." I think that is fair.
So still keep your eyes out for purple insulators everyone. But before you buy them, turn your eyes into blacklights and look at the insulators REAL close. Happy hunting!
-Erin
So yesterday was kind of a bummer. I decided to give Everett a haircut and accidentally buzzed off the front right half of his hair with the clippers.
The front right part in the photo above is all now super super short like baby hair. We have to part the rest of his hair over it like a comb over. Ugh. Rookie mistake. I should have left the top part alone.
I was also bummed because it turns out that my insulators were indeed irradiated. I have to refund the dude his money. I’ll do a longer post about this soon, but the whole exchange has been quite the debacle. So much for a Christmas present shopping spree :(
So with all that sadness in my heart, I was thrilled to see a package arrive from mega kind and generous reader Kevin.
He had mailed me my very own Big Hug Mug!! (If you don’t remember what the deal is with this mug, check out this post.) Kevin had spotted the mug, through the window, at an estate sale. He paid a whopping 50 cents for it! Amazing!
I love that he took this photo. It cracks me up!
So here it is in all its glory! I was going to surprise Zach with this for Christmas, but couldn’t contain my excitement. He was so happy!
So thank you Kevin! What a seriously rad thing to do! As for the rest of you readers, time to step up your game. I know we’ve been bad bloggers, but maybe if you send us more presents we would work harder ;)
-Erin
Maybe?
Well HOLY SMOKES! Here’s how the insulator auction turned out. Now to buy me some Christmas presents!!
-Erin
So a few years ago I saw this Christmas display that used old glass insulators set on top of a string of lights. It was mega cute. I tried googling an image for you, and the best I could find is this, which is also mega cute:
So I set out collecting insulators. I have a whole bunch now, but have never actually set up said light display. While in the basement today, I dug the insulators out and figured I would look them up on ebay to see if I should sell them.
I should interject here and say that I am still not totally sure what an insulator is/was. I mean, the name is self-explanatory, but what these actually insulated is unclear to me. Something about telephone poles.
I should also add that people EFFING love insulators. The websites and blogspots devoted to these glass phalli ( I thought it was phalluses but I stand corrected) are numerous.
So anyway, in my stash, I had 3 purple insulators. It turns out that these are insanely rare. And valuable. We’re talking way more money than you could even imagine someone would spend on a piece of purple glass that you stick Christmas lights under for decoration. Timmy and Joan bought these for me at an auction for $4.
So of course I immediately listed mine for sale and in the matter of a couple hours they already had 18 watchers and several bids.
And then this happened:
Some glass insulator know-it-all is trying to rain on my purple glass parade. WHO DOES HE THINK HE IS?! I panicked of course and started frantically looking up what the hell “radiated” insulators are. Turns out, the term is actually “irradiated,” so basically I should not trust this guy at all.
Irradiated glass, as it turns out, has literally been placed in the presence of a machine that emits radiation, like an x-ray machine. It turns the glass amazing colors like purple or cobalt blue. The glass will naturally turns these colors if left out in the sun for decades, say, on a telephone pole, but some scammers don’t want to wait for that to happen. They buy cheap insulators and then irradiate them. UGH.
This is a SUPER HOT TOPIC in the glass insulator community and is debated fiercely. I highly recommend poking around here. Here is a taste though:
^^^ UM, ok THIEF. Get down off those telephone poles!
So WTH. Are my insulators fake? I really don’t know. I don’t think so though. Who would go through the trouble of irradiating these and then selling them in an auction for $4?
From what I have read, it is super hard to tell which insulators have been irradiated and which are authentic. The fact that this guy thinks he could tell just by looking at a photo of mine on ebay is sketchy.
I am holding out hope for my little insulators! I will let you know how they end up doing!
-Erin