Dig This Treasure!

Sarah and I are working on some longer entries about our recent adventures, but in the meantime, let me share some new fave finds with you guys.

My sister and I visited the Romeo Peach Festival a few weeks ago.  We’ve been going to this since we were children, and every year we always swear it is the last time we will go.  You see, the Romeo Peach Festival is a really good place for people (not me) to buy Confederate Flag t-shirts and marshmallow shooting guns.  It is no longer a good place to buy antiques or high quality crafts.

To be fair, my sister and I went because we were on a mission to find these peach cookies we had two years ago, which then disappeared off the planet.  Turns out that these cookies aren’t even part of the Peach Festival, but come from a grocery store just outside of town.  We found them living in their peach cookie heaven, and proceeded to buy about 26 boxes each:

Just kidding, we each only bought 1 box each, and then I b*tched the whole way home about how I was an idiot for not buying more.

Ok, so besides the cookies, I did miraculously find one good treasure at the Peach Festival.  Two guys were selling random junk in a booth and I came across this old ceramic walrus bank:

I KNOW, RIGHT?! That is the cutest chef walrus you have ever done seen.  I bought him for $5 and put him in the last available space next to my kitchen scale collection.

OK, so another recent fave find came from the totally random thrift store trip that Sarah and I took a few weeks ago.  You might remember that I snagged a ton of baby clothes, but the best by far was this vintage baby sweater:

What is so perfect about this is that we are naming the baby Everett, so the E’s on the sweater actually make sense.  Baby E is going to be stylin’ and profilin’ for sure.

The last fave find is also for future baby and I found it at the Ferndale DIY Fair.  There was a booth selling all vintage clothes and knick-knacks called Octopus Pie Studios.  I found this sweater and pants set featuring whales and sailboats.  Sarah contends it is for a baby girl, but I refuse to believe that.

It might be kind of itchy to wear, but that is the price of dressing so fly.  

If you have any “fave finds” you can share them on our Facebook page.  Post a pic and tell us where you found your treasure.

-Erin 

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. 

Wow… with all the Antiques Roadshow posts and garage sale planning, we’re really behind on our normal Friday wrap-up posts. 

Two Fridays ago, Erin, my mom and I went to some sales that looked pretty good. The first was in Dearborn and seemed like it had a decent amount of antiques.

There’s Cindy, inspecting the valuables. 

A lot of the older pieces were pretty pricey. 

This was a handmade high chair that Erin was obsessed with. To me, it looked like something the Dothraki made. 

In the end, I found an old Pyrex travel thing–you know–the kind of thing with a warmer/carrier? Can you tell I cook ALL THE TIME? I also got a really cute sunhat that I’ll hopefully be able to use next week. Spoiler alert: DTT is going on vacation! 

I found some other items but it was so long ago that I’ve forgotten about them. The one complaint about this sale was that a) the employees were a little pushy and b) they had too many people collecting money! Whenever you went into another area of the house, they would “ring you up” there, which just made everything take so much longer. Look people, nobody is going to steal that grandma’s old clothes. 

Next up on our agenda was a sale that looked pretty high-end. We could tell because of the company running the sale. Anyway, even though it was high-end and a little pricey, I found some cool stuff. These people had a lot of really neat things in their house: 

I was mesmerized by this thing: 

We have these in our teaching labs at work and I could not figure out why in the world someone would have one mounted to their kitchen counter. Maybe they do powerpoint presentations for fun. 

A few minutes into being in this house, my mom asked me to look on eBay to figure out if bagpipes were worth anything. 

I tried, but in the end it was too complicated. I could not figure out which ones were or were not valuable, or whether this thing was even real! A few minutes after this, Erin came up to me and said, “Your mom’s buying a BAGPIPE?” Hey, she’s bought crazier things! 

My favorite part of the house was the basement, where they had their collection of (repro) cast iron banks. 

When I was down there, I also found this little model of me zooming around in my convertible: 

(EIGHTEEN DOLLARS?!)

For some reason, I really liked this picture: 

In the end, I came away with this really adorable model of a carnival ride. 

I love it so much. Adam does not. 

The women running this sale were not very friendly at all. They were also completely unwilling to negotiate, which is a drag. I’m sure Erin will tell you more about that. My mom bought this thing: 

I have no idea what it is. 

The last sale on our agenda looked good to me because there were TONS of books: 

In the end, I didn’t find much that was interesting. Except this old book about “sexual glands”: 

I also found some cute little minis and some old Garfield placemats. Here are some things I didn’t buy: 

And of course, this entry wouldn’t be complete without some info about what we ate that day. As I’ve mentioned, these days Erin only likes to eat at places with “family dining” in the name, so we ended up somewhere where she could eat this: 

I think my mom and I would like nothing more than to forget this meal forever and ever. 

-Sarah

Update from Erin: Sarah is right, the first sale had way too many sales people, and they were mega aggressive.  I got in one room by myself and the guy there said, “I’m not letting you out of this room unless you buy a pair of shoes.  We got too many shoes.”  Um, ok, that seems kind of not fair/illegal. (I mean kidnapping women at an estate sale, not owning too many shoes.)

I actually did buy a pair of shoes which was hilarious.  They were black Keds tennis shoes, brand new, and were $2.

I didn’t buy much here.  I got Zach some soap from Saks Fifth Avenue because he loves fancy soaps and once had a soap blog.  I know, very exciting.

The soap looks grody there, but it wasn’t.  I also bought this (vintage?) cigar that says, “It’s a boy!”  because we found out the day before that our baby is going to be of the male gender.  (Do boys like estate sales?  I HOPE SO.)

The second sale was fun to look at, but I’m really not into reproduction antiques.  There were a few real-looking antique pieces in the house, but it was hard to trust them when everything else was new.  These Toby mugs were real, but super super pricey:

I will buy a repro if it is MEGA cute.  Some of the cast iron banks were contenders:

Ultimately though,  I didn’t buy any.  I did want to buy this large Santa bulb (I pulled this pic from the internet).  While the one I found looked “vintage,” you could tell from the markings that it was brand new…probably from Pier One or something.  The filament inside was broken so it wouldn’t light up, but I thought it was still pretty cute as a decoration.

The woman running the sale told me $20 for this and I was astounded.  I told her I’d pay $10 (still a stretch) and she seemed really irritated.  I apologized and said I didn’t mean to offend her and then put the bulb back.  At this point, Sarah and her mom were still shopping and I was out of breath from going up and down stairs while being pretty hugely pregnant.  I asked the same woman if I could sit on the couch in the living room while I was waiting (it was a nice couch so I thought I’d ask) and she looked like she wanted to kill me.  I did end up sitting there but I just barely put my butt on the edge.  Oy.

The last sale was nothing to write home about, except that I found these adorable snowmen.  They were missing their hats which I found nearby, and then proceeded to place back on each one of them.  I didn’t buy these, but I was happy that with their hats on, someone else might.

P.S. Sarah’s mom didn’t buy the bagpipe after all.

Erin has mentioned getting some freebies at auctions in the past. Usually these are things that people end up getting in lots but don’t really want. I’ve been known to leave behind some stuff that I didn’t want at auctions too. Hey man, one person’s trash is another’s treasure!

I forgot to mention this in the entry about our adventures at the Tecumseh auction a few weeks ago. The people who run that joint are always willing to let you tell them what to put up next. I had eyed this adorable planter amid some gross rubble. It was dirty as heck but it didn’t have any chips or cracks or anything like that. 

I went to the front of the auction and grabbed it, and took it over to one of the homies working there. He asked where I found it and I gestured over to the table and he said, “Oh all that stuff has already been bought!” I felt like a giant ass, and then he said, “Those people are the ones who bought it all.” I looked at the couple and they kept making a “take it” gesture. I mouthed, “Are you sure?!” and the woman looked at me like I was crazy–like who in the heck would want that dirty sheep? Anyway, awesome for me because not only did I get my treasure but I got it for free! 

It cleaned up so beautifully and I have it up on eBay now. Seriously, I wish I had documented how filthy this thing was before I cleaned it up. Here it is now: 

Are you dying from the cuteness? I sure am. 

It seems like sometimes these things can go for crazy amounts of money, but so far none of the Relpo planters I’ve sold have gone for a whole lot. Then again, I’ve only sold one other. It was also adorable but it only sold for $10. I mean look at this one.

 It’s cute but is it worth $262?!

Apparently so! 

Anyway, if anyone has any idea about what makes some of these guys more valuable than others, let us know!

-Sarah

Last Friday, we got started a little later than expected because I had some things to wrap up at work. There were only a couple of sales that looked really good. Erin and I were lamenting the fact that we haven’t come across a really awesome digger in a long time. I’m not saying we got our “awesome digger” fix… but we definitely got our “regular digger” fix. 

The first sale we went to was in Taylor and it ended up being at a condo. On our way there, I started feeling really woozy which normally means a combination of two things: I’ve had too much coffee and not enough food. So I did what any person seeking nutrients would, and stopped at McDonald’s. Erin admitted that she had never had a chicken mcnugget, so I had to change that. Here is a picture of Erin losing her chicken mcnugget virginity: 

Check out that horrific ring. 

When we went inside the first sale, it did not look promising: 

Lots of cheap figurines and such. But then, I turned the corner and looked down the basement stairs: 

I was of course delighted by this view. There is nothing I love rummaging through more than paper and books. What can I say? I’m a librarian! It only got more exciting the further I got into the basement: 

Erin found me down here and said, “Didn’t we already go to this sale?” because way back at the start of this blog, you may remember seeing some pictures that looked pretty similar. The basement was just filled with old magazines, books, and other paper “stuff.” There were so many pulp and romance novels. Here’s one of the best ones that Erin snagged: 

It was really difficult to sort through all of the stuff down there because it was really dusty and disorganized. I still managed to sniff out some old greeting cards and cool books. Here are two pictures that Erin snapped of me in my element: 

That second picture was taken upstairs, obviously. When I got out of the basement, as I was going up, Erin was on her way down. She looked at me and said sadly, “There are so many more books.” She knew I would not be quick. But because I am a good friend, I hurried it up and gathered some stuff that looked cool. But I’ll admit that I spent part of the weekend kicking myself for not going back on Saturday and spending more time sorting through some of that stuff. 

The coolest thing I found was a partial set of the vintage series “Best in Children’s Books.” Some of the early volumes of this set contain illustrations by Andy Warhol, Maurice Sendak, and Ezra Jack Keats that were never published elsewhere. The main reason I was kicking myself was that I didn’t grab ALL of the volumes from this set. Anyway, whether they sell or not varies, but I haven’t decided if I’m keeping them or selling them anyway. 

The next house we stopped at was the home of a Psychologist and an OB/GYN. There was some really awesome sh*t in this house, including…

…more books! 

Besides books, there was an old ‘50s Freud couch (technical term): 

Old '50s models of the stages of embryonic growth: 

and old intelligence tests! 

They had this old medical stuff priced pretty high, but Erin and I both still took risks on it. I bought two different intelligence test kits–both for children. They had them priced at $75 and said they’d take $50 each. I took the risk. I haven’t listed mine yet but Erin listed hers. She can update you all on how it’s going. 

We went to one final sale, and since Erin bought more than I did there, I’ll let her tell you all about it. 

-Sarah

Update from Erin: Chicken Nuggies taste like nothing.  I don’t know why people eat them.  Maybe I needed some of that Sweet & Sour sauce.  Anyway, the reason I had never eaten a nugget is because my sister used to get them and they looked all gray and lumpy inside.  Sarah said that the new nugs aren’t like this.  I think her exact words were, “Yeah, they don’t have those lumpers anymore,” which is funny because Sarah’s nickname in high school was “lumpers.”

Her other nickname in high school was “The Homicidal Virgin,” which was coincidentally the name of the book Sarah mentioned above.  I bought this book and several others.  I thought they would sell easily on ebay because they are all hilariously named, but also very sexy.  So far no bids.

I pretty much hated this first sale because I know nothing about books, so I will just skip to the next one.  The psychologist sale was great.  Lots and lots of neat medical stuff to look at.  The wife was an obstetrician, so there was a lot of birth related things. I bought an old “Birth Atlas” to sell.  I paid 5 dollars for it, and it is listed elsewhere online for $140.  

Sarah mentioned the Intelligence tests we bought.  Mine is up now on ebay, and is currently bid up to $54.  Completed listings show the same one selling for around $100, so hopefully mine will go up a bit.  

What’s funny is that someone messaged me on ebay and asked how many puzzles there were in the set, and what the puzzles were of.  I could only figure out 3 of the 4 puzzles!! There is an elephant, a man, and a head, but the last puzzle makes no sense.  I don’t know if this is on purpose, or if I have now proven just how dumb I am.

Here’s something I passed on at this sale:

666?  The devil be ridin’ dirty in that Holgate Toys truck.  Watch out children.

The last sale we visited was a vintage Girl Scout goldmine.  I was happy about this because I was a hardcore Girl Scout growing up (all the way through High School!)  I loved Girl Scouts because my troop never earned badges.  We just went camping and made crafts.  

I bought a bunch of old GS books and some GS jewelry.

I should mention that I was a REALLY good friend to Sarah at this sale.  Being a good friend is an important Girl Scout rule.  Listen, a circle’s round, it has no end, that’s how long I want to be your friend.  I LIVE BY THAT.  Anyway, so there was this great sterling silver enamel GS ring that I found but Sarah convinced me she wanted to buy it “to wear.”  She was also a Girl Scout and thought that wearing this nice ring would be a fun reminder.  

I’ll have you all know that Sarah now has this ring LISTED ON EBAY FOR SALE.  So let that mull around in your brain for awhile.  Don’t think I won’t be invoicing her for a finder’s fee.

-Erin