Worth At Least
You might remember the auction in Romulus that kind of kicked off Sarah’s auction fever. Remember she bought that whole platter of dolls?
We ventured back to this auction a few Fridays ago. The wares looked really appealing.
We ran into a friend of ours at this auction and he was there scoping out some paintings. He thought they might be mega valuable, like tens of thousands, if they were real. Sarah and I explained to him that prices at this auction sometimes go really high (we saw a saxophone sell for $4,000 once). Really though, to us, “really high” means something goes over like $60. Our friend said he was willing to spend a couple grand on the paintings which made me be like 1. Are you secretly rich? 2. Why have you never told me you were secretly rich? and 3. Buy me those paper mache Santas because I don’t want to spend more than $50 on them.
[Spoiler alert: The paintings sold for over $2,000 each and our friend didn’t win any of them. The Santas went for over $200, and not to me.]
There were actually two auctions happening at this place at the same time. A back room was filled with all old, ceramic baby plates being auctioned off separately.
Here is a plate showing me on the day that I got chased by another dog while out walking George and then in anger called a man fat:
Sarah and I hung out in this baby plate room the most because items were selling really affordably. In the main auction room, things were quite different. You see, this auction is great because they have really nice things all the time. However, the auctioneer is, to be frank, super obnoxious.
He does this whole act with EVERY item in which he says, “Ok we got this [insert item] and clearly this is very old and it must be WORTH AT LEAST [insert some crazy high price].” This gets so frustrating because sometimes he doesn’t even know what an item is, and yet he makes up some fantastical price for it. And then the item always sells for around that price.
Kudos to him for having such a trustworthy audience, all of whom are going to be so sad when they do some research on ebay later.
Ok, so back in the baby plate room, I scored two items. Both of these are Roseville pottery, a brand I bought and sold recently. These plates came together in a lot that I paid $40 for. I am keeping the rabbit one for future baby’s room:
I love this because the rabbits kind of look like weird martian rabbits.
The second plate has chicks on it and I am going to list it on ebay:
Other than these two things, I didn’t buy anything else at the auction.
Sarah tried to buy some things but kept failing miserably. After the baby plate auction, a third separate auction started for a bunch of old postcards. There were literally thousands of postcards, all stored in huge albums. Each album was selling for $80-$200 each, depending on the content of the cards inside.
It was sad to watch. In my head I was cheering for Sarah, and visibly holding my breath each time she was bidding. But this SAME WOMAN each time would outbid her. This woman bought nearly every album and spent a ton of cash doing so.
There’s Sarah looking forlorn in the crowd. I wanted to yell out, “Come on! Just let her buy one!!” but there was a whole crowd of people wanting to just buy one album and they didn’t get to either.
It turns out that this woman owns an online store in which she scans vintage postcards that are past copyright and turns them into “new things”–probably prints them on a ton of sh*t. To be fair, this is a genius idea. Still though, she could have shared a little bit of the bounty.
-Erin
Update from Sarah: Before I get amped up with postcard talk, let me show you a few things that were cool at this auction that I did not purchase.
I’m really kicking myself for missing out on that sign because Adam realllllly liked it when I showed him the picture, and it would fit in very well in our kitchen.
That plate is so stinkin’ cute but I could not rationalize buying it because I do not have baby boys.
Giant shelf with tiny drawers? Yes, please!
These aren’t cool–they’re super ugly and look like ducks with alligator heads. But I think they were Roseville and I wanted to show them to you.
Ok, postcard time. What that lady does with her postcards is what Adam has been begging me to do with all of the paper goods I find that are past copyright. There is something about this that really bothers me and makes me feel bad–that I’d be turning someone’s old artwork into something mass produced. Also, in case you forgot, Adam–I have a full-time job. I don’t know–good for her. But it’s not something I’d want to do. Also, I actually felt hatred toward her while the auction was happening. I mean come on. These albums had HUNDREDS of cards in them each–do you really need 10,000 postcards?!
They were really cool cards and in very good condition. Here’s an example of why I wanted just ONE album to sort through.
Oh also at one point, when they were letting people choice out the albums of cards (there were so many albums that the auctioneer would say the winner had to take 4 or 5 at the high bid price) and she won, she looked at her loooong list of what she wanted and said, “Where’s 41? I want that one.” The auctioneer was like, “You already bought that one.” WTFFFFFFF?!!!!! Clearly, she didn’t even know what she did or didn’t have in her possession!
I wish we had gotten a picture of her because she had a little minion/friend with her who was in charge of her book full of notes about each album. Erin said that when we get older, that’s going to be us. But *I’m* going to be the a$$hole buying all the postcards. :(
I did end up buying two things. First was this baby plate with hounds running on it. I’m not sure why I wanted it so bad but I did, and it was only $20.
The second item was this set of baby plates that I really loved. Shockingly, Adam also really loved these.
So cute!
What Erin explained about this auctioneer is true. This experience really just made me not want to go to his auctions again. We had a surprise run-in with him the following week, though, which we will tell you about soon!
All’s Well That Ends Well
Two Fridays back, the sale listings looked awful, so Sarah and I contemplated staying home. We eventually decided to suck it up though and find some garage sales. You all remember how entertaining that was last time…
Before the garage sale-ing, however, we did stop at one estate sale that looked kind of not-horrible. It turned out to be, well, horrible.
Everything was really Hallmark-y, but like the dollar store version of Hallmark stuff.
It was like the Boyd’s bears strolled up into town and took this home by force. Except that it wasn’t really the Boyd’s bears, but instead their creepy backwoods cousins who you don’t normally invite over for Thanksgiving dinner.
To be fair, I did buy two Waechtersbach mugs to go with my Christmas set. They were 50 cents each which is a steal.
We hightailed it out of there and, while driving, saw this sign:
A 4 day vintage market?! That is EXACTLY what we need! What sounds better than some sort of market filled with old treasures that probably occurs only once a year and is therefore filled with only the finest of goods?!
When we followed the signs to the “vintage market” we found more signs (the ones you see above). Here, let me zoom in more:
Well, sh*t. Turns out, our “vintage market” was the name of a party store and they had some MAD DEALS on ribs. When I realized what was happening, Sarah refused to believe it. She was so heartbroken. She tried to convince me that these were different signs than the original, but there was no denying the truth:
So after this huge failure, things were looking bad. We started driving in a neighborhood after we saw a garage sale sign, and came upon this:
A big ol’ trash heap, and a metaphor for how our day was going.
But then things started to turn around. We rolled up to one garage sale and it looked really good! It was like our own private “vintage market” tucked away in this grandma’s garage.
There was a huge table filled with old, really collectible pottery. The first thing I saw was that she had a Van Briggle vase. I was familiar with the brand because of Antiques Roadshow and knew that some pieces sold for thousands. It turns out that the pottery actually belonged to the old woman’s friend, who proceeded to tell Sarah and I all about his pottery collecting.
The Van Briggle piece he had marked $50, which was too risky for me to buy. I looked up a few similar pieces on ebay and they all sold for around $100. After last week’s ebay disasters though, I wanted to take a less expensive risk. I decided to buy three pieces of Roseville Mostique pottery for $5 each. Very reasonable.
We’ve seen Roseville pottery a lot at estate sales, and I’m not a huge fan of it. I know it is really collectible though, so I figured I could flip this set pretty easily.
And, I did!
The pottery guy at this garage sale even gave me this McCoy cookie jar for free! I had been looking at it and he decided I must take it home. Ok!
So our luck was definitely changing! It even continued when we visited a nearby thrift store. Thrift stores are something Sarah and I barely dabble in, although we have many blog friends who do their picking exclusively at these places. Maybe we should go more often, because there are certainly great deals to be had! You might as well call me Macklemore because I loved this thrift shop so much.
I got a whole garbage bag full of baby clothes for $30. Some still had the tags on them! And there was a bunch of Ralph Lauren stuff in there. (Also, can you tell I’m ready to pop? My face looks like a marshmallow.)
So cute.
I think Sarah bought these shoes:
Or maybe she didn’t. I can’t remember.
-Erin
Update from Sarah: I definitely bought those shoes for my next trip clubbin’. They are the perfect mix of sexy and schoolgirl. Ok, I’m lying. I did end up finding a nice lightweight cotton Land’s End cardigan and some books at the thrift shop, but that’s about it. Oh and this t-shirt for Baby Everett.
Erin and Zach LOVE cute little t-shirts with sayings on them like this, so be sure to send all your hand-me-downs their way.
The first estate sale was such a nightmare. It was one of those sales where you’re looking around for ANYTHING you might possibly want, and coming up shorthanded. For example, I actually considered buying this.
Then I saw it was marked $20.
The garage sale was the surprise of the day–Erin passed on the Van Briggle vase but I thought about it for a while and remembered how valuable Arts & Crafts stuff can be, so I asked if he would go lower than $50. The lowest he would go was $45, so I took the chance. It was a really beautiful piece, even though I don’t even really care about pottery!
I looked it up and ones like it seemed to sell for $100-150. So I listed it at $155 and let people make offers. After a couple of days, someone swooped in and the rest is history!
The only thing that Erin forgot to mention is that the guy selling the pottery drove and parked THIS THING in front of the house!
Overall, it was a very strange sale.