Dig This Treasure!

Update from Sarah: If this looks familiar, it’s because you saw it here. I’ve been waiting all week for the opportunity to “give” it to Erin.

Fave Find: Max and Scout statues

If you know me, you know I love my pets insanely. Two of my favorite finds are these two porcelain figures that remind me of my dog, Max, and cat, Scout. They both look a lot like the real animals! Sorry the pictures are a little dark. I took them at night and I enjoy dungeon lighting. Just ask Adam.

Update from Erin: Sarah is right, these figurines do look like real animals. Not necessarily Sarah’s animals, but real animals nonetheless.

Feb 09

Fave Find: Mexican Mule Planter

This guy is the cutest ever. He looks like a mix between a donkey and Quasimodo. Right now he resides on top of my refrigerator, but when Spring comes I’ll put a nice plant in his back. $6

Update from Sarah: I cannot believe this is a “favorite find”. What is wrong with her?

Update from Erin: The day I bought this, I came home and took a nap. I woke up and looked over at it sitting on the table amongst all the day’s treasures, and I said out loud “I love you.” He is srrsly the cutest.

Feb 08

Be My Little Baby Bumblebee…

A public service announcement: Despite all of our jokes so far, the act of going into someone’s home and sorting through their belongings is often quite sad. You find things that once had meaning to someone else–items that belonged to a person with family and friends who loved them dearly.

When we go to a sale, we are riffling through a person’s home, searching for treasures with unknown histories that we will instill with new meanings. This is cool in many ways, but it can also be devastating if you think about it for too long. The original meanings are lost–often forever.

We have never had the privilege of uncovering information about an individual whose home we have ransacked. Sure, sometimes you hear a few comments from the people running the sale–but nothing too personal. Erin and I are overcome with excitement and are still trying to wrap our brains around the insanity of having the chance to actually put some of the puzzle pieces together with the House of Horrors. Our sense of wonder and humor about the artwork aside, this experience is seriously a privilege and honor.

This is the owner of The House of Horrors, circa 1986. She was an ice skater, an amazing mother, and she adored her son. She is pictured here in the most awesome bumblebee costume. What a lovely, fun-loving woman. RIP, Ethel.

I wore almost this exact costume (except tinier, of course, and sans the sexy pantyhose) in my first ballet recital (1984):

Our dance was choreographed to Theresa Brewer’s 1960 version of “Be My Little Baby Bumblebee.” As soon as I saw the ice skating picture, that song popped into my head.

Special thanks to Ethel’s son and daughter-in-law for their generosity in letting us post the image. It is wonderful.

Feb 07

Money Maker: “Where’s the Beef?” tee

Where’s the beef? Remember those old commercials? They were pretty awesome. But if you were born after 1984, like one of the authors of this blog, you will have no memories of this, because you were not even a fetus when these commercials were regularly interrupting your family’s nightly Wheel of Fortune or Jeopardy viewings.

Anyway, you may have noticed that Wendy’s has recently revived its “Where’s the Beef?” campaign. At first, I was irritated. When I saw a repro of the shirt at Urban Outfitters around Christmas, all sorts of obscenities ran through my head, because I’ve owned an original since high school, and had been planning to sell it on eBay for (hopefully) some mad cash.

Anyway, then I thought… maybe this is the perfect time for me to sell it! So I listed it for $29.99, and it had 2 or 3 watchers, and nobody bought it. So I relisted it for $14.99 and it ended up selling for $38, and about six different people were warring over it. WTF?! Here are some pics of the shirt:

I bought this t-shirt way before I ever met Erin. I found it for 25 cents at a garage sale in the mid ‘90s. I used to think it was real cool to wear it ironically when I was a vegetarian for two years in high school. Then I got mono and realized that people can’t survive on french fries and ranch dressing.

Anyway, I digress. One of my favorite things to do when people buy my items on eBay is look at the last few things that person bought, so I can try to figure out their steeze. One of the best things about selling this shirt is that the person who ended up winning the shirt must be the weirdest person on the face of the earth. Here are the last six things this person bought. Trust me–it is worth clicking on the links:

Things That Freak Your Husband Out (TTFYHO): Old Clowns

Oftentimes, when I return home from a day of treasure hunting with Erin, Adam is appalled by what I have purchased. Sometimes these appalling items are for my own personal collection. Other times, they are items that I have purchased with the hope of resale. Sometimes I trick him and tell him that an item is something I love, but really it’s something I’m intending to sell. Here’s the best example of this:

Isn’t this clown great? It’s so scary, and so old. I purchased it for $15. I haven’t determined if it’s worth anything yet, though. In the meantime, I want to keep making Adam think I love it.

Update from Erin: This segment of the blog will contain more items from Sarah than from me. First, she buys more things than me, so based on math the odds are that her husband will be freaked by an item. Second, she blatantly buys things that will freak out her husband, so again, the odds are in her favor. That said, I LOVE this clown.

Feb 06

REAL LIFE

So it happened. Because Erin is the master of the Internet, we tracked down James and his wife. He doesn’t seem to have any reasonably accessible contact info anywhere on the Internet, but his wife has a ton, so I sent a her a message and I hope she can convince him to entertain the idea of answering some questions about his artwork!

I am in awe of the power of the Internet and keep walking around the house, proclaiming, “The Internet is so amazing."

I wish adult me could have written a letter to younger me, explaining how crazy and awesome the Internet would make life. I hate time travel, though. So that would never have occurred.

Money Maker: Original Goonies Movie Posters

The best things I’ve found at an estate sale BY FAR were two original Goonies posters. Actually, Erin unrolled them, but then gave them to me. I’ll bet she regrets that now. I honestly did not originally have the intention of reselling them–I just thought they were cool. Again, a product of my childhood. Here’s what they looked like:

Anyway, this person clearly had owned a theater or at least had worked at one, because he/she had HUNDREDS of original movie posters, all rolled up, most in poster tubes. There were so many in this condition that it was really difficult for us to keep track of what we had already looked at and what was a fresh roll of posters–they were rolled in stacks. Erin thought she was finding gold when she found two Bette Midler movie posters that were signed by that diva, but little did she know that she had given the real gold to her BFF.

Erin and I began hoarding the posters we each wanted to purchase, the whole time uncertain about how much they were charging for each poster. In the middle of our digging, this weird dude (who I will name Shit Disturber) who we’ve seen at other sales came down and started nosing into our bidness, which irritated the hell out of me (shocking), because I did not want to share that giant pile of posters with ANYONE. He started asking us about what we were doing and getting in our way, but I think my bad attitude toward him finally made him leave. Of course, five minutes later, this big burly dude who was clearly one of the dudes hired to look menacing at the sale came down and told us that each poster was $4. Now, at the time, this sounded like highway robbery because we thought these posters were not valuable. We were also pissed that Shit Disturber obviously sent that dude downstairs.

We told the burly man, “Oh really? These aren’t worth anything…” because one thing I have learned from Erin is that if you act like you really know more than someone running one of these sales, they believe you. Sometimes we DO actually know more than the people running the sales about specific items. Other times we don’t. But acting like you do goes a long way. We honestly thought the posters were worthless, but whoops! We were wrong!

Because of this, we started being more selective about which ones we were keeping in our piles. My largest regret, knowing what I know now, is that I did not purchase the two mint original Monsters Inc. posters that were in that basement, because those look to sell for about $90 each. At the time, all I thought was, “Where in the hell are we going to hang a Monster’s Inc. poster?” (You’re welcome, Adam. See? Proof that I DO think of where things that I purchase at these sales might go.)

The task of sorting through the massive number of posters down there starting making us cranky, and we eventually gathered our finds and moved on to another part of the house, where we found a stack of Playboy Magazines from the 1960s. When we determined those weren’t valuable, an old perv swooped in and took most of them. I still bought a couple.

When we checked out, the guy didn’t even LOOK IN OUR TUBES to see how many posters we had! He just took our word for it. (But because we are both very honest people, we told him the truthful count of how many we had.) He also only charged us $3 per poster. Anyway, I ended up with the following original movie posters: Goonies (2 different ones), Pee Wee’s Big Adventure, The Outsiders, Edward Scissorhands. Erin ended up with those Bette Midler ones. Once again, I’ll bet she regrets that decision. Here are pics of the Pee Wee and Outsiders posters:

So one thing we learned right away when we started researching these posters was that most posters from the ‘80s that were sent to theaters were folded. The fact that these were all rolled and never folded made them even more valuable.

So I’ll bet you’re all waiting to hear how much those badboys sold for… right? Well, the first thing I’ll tell you is this: Nobody wants an original Outsiders poster but me. Second thing–Adam really wanted that Pee Wee poster, but once the two Goonies posters sold for so much bank, I told him to deal with it–I was selling it. Unfortunately, Pee Wee only sold for $60 (still… I’ll take the $57 profit).

The first Goonies poster sold for $90.99. The second one (the “Map-Style” rare one) sold for $231.49. Those Goonies nerds all had sniper things on that poster because it went from a $60 bid to $230 in like, four seconds. IT WAS THE BEST.

-Sarah