Diamond in the Rough Part One

The sale we hit this past Friday looked packed full of vintage goodness. It was in Lincoln Park, about a half hour or so away. There were no other sales near it, so we were taking a risk by driving out. If the sale was a bust, we’d end up going home empty handed. Luckily, things turned out hilariously good for us…

The living room had tables and tables full of jewelry. That’s a photo above of Sarah perusing the goods. I haphazardly glanced and the moved on because it was clear that everything was costume jewelry, broken junk, or cheapy Avon-type stuff.

Things seemed like slim pickings elsewhere. I was starting to feel discouraged.

Check out the back leg of that horse. Someone stuck a pen cap or something on it. I was cracking up when I saw this. Total pirate/Robocop type sh*t right thurr.

In retrospect, I should have bought these sunglasses that said “To Hot." They are kind of the best. I thought that people only confused to/too/two on the internet, but it just goes to show you that grammar has been long gone for awhile.

Things were looking pretty dire. Then we hit the basement and a guy working the sale started chatting my ear off. He was clearly lonely down there in the cellar and was looking for any company he could get. He started telling me about sales long past (we’re talking decades) and how some dude still owes him $25,000 for his share in a giant lot of gold coins he found. He then proceeded to share with me that this particular house we were at had its own hidden treasures. See this shelving:

That bottom shelf was actually a secret hiding spot that was filled with rare baseball cards and coins! The guy who owned the house had two giant safes, both of which were kept empty to fool robbers. All the real goods were hidden away in this cabinetry.

This seriously peaked my interest. There had to be treasures in this house! I just wasn’t looking hard enough! OK, time to work…

Ok, still not a good treasure. I returned to the upstairs and found this Nintendo magazine. I saw that the same one sells on ebay so I snatched it up for $1.

Sarah was still hard at work looking through jewelry, so I joined her.

And then I found this:

It was a vial filled with broken and mismatched earrings. I chuckled because what are the actual odds that this might contain a REAL diamond? I showed it to Sarah and jokingly mentioned how crazy it would be if in fact there WERE diamonds in here. Sarah told me to take my chances and buy the container, and at the very least, we would have a funny story about returning to that Cash 4 Gold place we visited once. The lady charged me $1 for the vial!

This entry is getting really long, so I will hold off on telling you about the contents of the vial until Part Two. In the meantime, check out my final purchase from this sale. This cool old automatic watch was still running just great, and will be an easy sell on ebay. They charged me a mere $2 for it! I had Zach put a new band on it so it might sell better.

-Erin

Update from Sarah: That watch right there is a beaut! Maybe I’ll buy it if she puts it up on eBay.

So Erin summarized pretty well. The only thing I want to reinforce (if it wasn’t already crystal clear) is that there was not an abundance of really great treasures at this sale, even though the pictures online made it seem like there was. Here’s a basic summary of the sale:

So Diamond in the Rough is truly a perfect title for this post.

The one blog-worthy treasure I found I have to keep secret for now because it’s a gift. What I will say this sale had going for it was that the prices were insanely cheap. So cheap, in fact, that I felt sort of like I ripped these people off. When we got outside, I said to Erin, "Did we just rob them?” She answered in the affirmative.

Anyway, I ended up with some classics of children’s literature, and some cool costume jewelry.