Dig This Treasure!

The injustice of this is extreme: I love snow storms. I’m seriously obsessed with them. But why does one have to fall on sale day? The sales tomorrow look amazing… LIKE THIS:

Look at that stack of vintage cards!!!

Will we travel through treacherous conditions to find treasures, or will we stay home snuggled in our jammies? Only time will tell.

(Don’t worry, mom(s). If it’s bad, we will stay home.)

-Sarah

So, the first house we went to on Friday was in Dearborn, and even though we didn’t find extreme treasures, we found something amazing: A crazy 1960s beauty salon in the basement that was stuck in time! Here’s Erin gettin’ her hair did: 

On the right, you’ll notice the reception desk, and then the hair washing station. 

Here is Carmen’s 1955 Diploma from the Virginia Farrell Beauty School… (diplomas are one of the saddest things we see at sales… diaries being the worst.) 

Here are a few more shots of the entire salon: 

I was the first one into the basement, and I could hear Erin at the top of the stairs gabbing away with a stranger, so I was like, “Erin! Get down here!” She told me she immediately thought that I found an extreme treasure that she was missing out on. When she realized what it was, she decided that an old beauty salon was an even better treasure. 

We both found a couple of things and started checking out. Erin bought an antique baby scale (?!), a meat grinder, a Christmas coffee mug, and a box of Bakelite sockets. The woman running the sale was skeptical of Erin’s purchases, and said something like, “you have an interesting selection of items here.” When she found the Bakelite sockets, I think she started catching on to Erin trying to make some mad cash. So Erin said, “No… we just like to find weird things at sales. We have a blog!" 

Anyway, this conversation went on and on, and Erin started holding up a line of people, which made her start sweating. The woman wrote down the name of our blog (WHAT WAS ERIN THINKING?!) and Erin told her that we could sponsor her sales with a banner. WHAT. THE. HELL. When we got outside, I told her that she should always be thinking of a good reason to want something valuable to tell sellers when they ask. A reason besides reselling it. Like making an art project out of it. 

I bought an ugly table cloth and a creepy old doll. In retrospect, I wish I hadn’t bought either of these things. The one thing I will say is that Erin chatting these people up made them give us deals and start opening up to us, so I’ll give her that.

The house after this was the Grey Gardens house, and then we had to make a decision. There were two sales left on our list–one was closer, but ended sooner, and we were starving. The other was all the way in Utica, but it was open until 5. We decided on the Utica sale so that we could eat before. 

The Utica sale was another Cash & Cari sale. It looked sort of interesting, but nowadays their sales are always incredibly overpriced, so I was skeptical. We arrived and there were a crapload of people in the house, which immediately made me want to die. Also, the stuff in the house was abundant, but all gross and tacky. This person had a weird assortment of collections. It was like he/she decided to collect EVERY thing that they had a single item of. Shot glass collection? Check. Barbie Collection? 

Check. 

Beer tap collection? 

Check. 

Lava lamp collection? 

Check. You can’t get much worse than a lava lamp collection.

Also, the prices on all of this garbage were insane. I don’t understand what’s happened–less than a year ago, her sales had stuff that was totally reasonably priced. I can’t believe anyone was buying anything. For example, there was a "Canadian Barbie” that I picked up because I have a friend who is Canadian, and I was like, “That might be cute…” But no… It was marked $75!!! That thing sells on eBay for between 25 and 50 bucks. WTF?! Cari is gettin’ a little too big for her britches. Also, one of her employees was in the Barbie room showing another employee a video of the largest blackhead ever being popped. I realize this is something I would do, but still–real professional, ladies.

At this point, I wanted nothing more than to warp home. Instead, we had to drive for an hour in rush hour traffic. 

By far, the best treasure of the day was finding that Better Made (Adam pointed out that their website is bmchips.com… bad choice, guys) and National Coney Island have collaborated to make these: 

If you know me, you know that chili fries are my favorite food. Erin was back on the east side of town on Saturday, so I made her pick up five more bags of them. Adam and I keep eating them, exclaiming, “they taste JUST LIKE chili fries!" 

-Sarah

Update from Erin: Ok, I did buy an old baby scale.  But how is this not adorable?  I am going to try and sell it, and if that doesn’t work, it is a cute thing to have in a nursery.  

Sarah kept pointing out that this scale is all dirty, which is true.  Obviously, though, she has never heard of a Mr. Clean Magic Eraser.

Let me also say that I do indeed have a hard time being put on the spot by people, be it at estate sale or the gas station.  Sarah knows that I always get roped into long conversations with strangers, which is probably why the Jehovah’s Witnesses know my name and visit every other day.  Bottom line: I am too polite.  So yeah, I did say we would be willing to sponsor an estate sale with some sort of banner.  But why not?  I have never had a giant banner for anything before.

And I need to point out that this cavorting did lead to some good discounts for us.  I got these old welding glasses for free at the sale.  And they already have 2 bids on ebay.  (Steampunks will buy anything labeled "steampunk”.)

I also got this adorable thing for Zach because he actually wears tie pins and cuff links.

I don’t know why you would want to mix ashes will all of your valuables, but maybe it is an old-timey thing.

The last thing I will say about this sale is that I was OBSESSED with this old metal tray table.  It was part of the beauty salon stuff.  The industrial look of it was just really neat.  In the end, I had no place to put it in our house, so it got left behind.

Our sales this week were pretty interesting, not really because of our purchases but because of the weird-ass houses we visited.

The second house we visited on our journey was in Bloomfield Hills, and by all appearances, was about to be one of the fanciest (and largest) homes I had ever entered.  This was pretty much true, until things got weird.

Turns out that this house was the PLAYHOUSE of a larger home behind it.  In the 1960s, it was finally separated from its master home and sold as a residence itself.  The first sign of its former playhouse glory days was the front entry:

Looks normal enough, but this entryway used to be a POOL!  Check out that tile floor.  The drop-off on the right was the deep-end.  And check out the former pool wall and drains:

The first few rooms of this house were really impressive.  They had a tavern, a wine cellar, and a crazy opulent ballroom.

As we got further into the recesses of this house though, we started noticing a severe change of scenery.  Things went the way of Grey Gardens pretty quickly.

An upstairs bedroom had a once-beautiful atrium with a hot tub.  It now looked like the apocalypse had set in and people were long vanished from these parts:

The carpet in nearly all of the upstairs’ rooms was either horrifically stained or looked like this:

To be honest, it was just WEIRD.  I looked at Sarah and said, “Something is not right.” The house felt increasingly sad, and creepy.

We found out before leaving that both owners of the home were still alive, but had moved into a condo after getting Alzheimer’s.  The home was a fading testament to their high-style living.  

Again, it all felt very sad.  But it also felt just really, really weird.  Who leaves behind a gorgeous mansion to sit and decay?  Where was their family?  We didn’t get answers to those questions, but here is what we did get (not much):

I found a cool hand-painted Mexican plate for $5.

And a book about the wilderness because I am OBSESSED with anything relative to Into the Wild.

Everything else in the house was too weird, too dirty, or too expensive.  I was really happy with my 2 finds though, and at seeing the inside of this wild home.

-Erin

Update from Sarah: Erin’s description is perfect. Also, the house started having a grody smell after a while and my gag reflex started kicking in.

Another thing–I tried to buy the sellers’ magnifying glass by accident. What can I say? It looked cool and was left sitting there on a table with other old things! 

I did find some cool vintage sheets that say “SLEEP” all over them: 

They smell pretty musty but you can tell they’re clean and aren’t stained. I need someone who can sew to make me a little throw quilt out of them. 

I also got a little gnome Christmas ornament and some greeting cards to add to my collection. 

We went to two other interesting houses on Friday that I’ll post about ASAP. 

P.S. Look at the giant chip in that plate Erin bought. WTF? 

So we headed out on Friday, full of promise, eagerly awaiting a repeat of the success we had found the week before.  The first sale we hit was pretty packed, with both stuff and people.  It was the type of sale where people use one arm to sort through items, and their other arm to block you from getting anywhere near the stuff they are looking at.  With a house full of people all doing this, it gets annoying pretty fast.  I’ve gotten good at muscling around in these types of situations, but it is still real stressful.

My first find was a bunch of vintage plastic toys.  I had been researching these on ebay last week for an art project I’m working on and found that they can be surprisingly valuable.  There is a good mix of cowboys, indians, horses, spacemen, pirates, knights, and more.  The woman running the sale mentioned that many of the pieces are by Marx, which I guess is one of the more collectible brands.  

I also bought some vintage jello/baking molds since I had had previous success in selling them.

Here is some of our loot while we were standing in line to check out.  The line was the slowest ever, as the sellers were having to phone in every credit card transaction.  At some point, Sarah contemplated leaving the line to go back for a huge ceramic dog she had saw.  I encouraged her to at least take a photo of it so we can document all the questionable items she considers buying.  She ended up just buying it, which I am sure Adam is thrilled about.  Hopefully it will make an appearance soon in TTFYHO.

Check out that nice kitten postcard in Sarah’s box.

The rest of the day was filled with bummer sales.  A lot were overpriced or had nothing of interest.  I did find this little buddy, by Josef Original.  He is pretty much the cutest.

I first came across Josef Original figures at Christmas, when I found this guy:

So a rather uneventful Friday.  No huge scores but still lots of fun.  I even ate a cookie for lunch, which is always a fun thing to do.  And we ended up going to the casino, although there were no huge scores there either.  We’ll get ‘em next time.

-Erin 

_______________________________________________________

Erin is right, the sales weren’t that great. We were also both sort of “off” on Friday. Erin seemed cranky, and I was sick. However, shockingly, I still came home with a carload of items. The first sale was the most fruitful in terms of treasures. I’ll do a separate post about the ceramic dog another day. He’s an Irish Setter and I love him. 

I found some cool items at this sale, but they were pretty overpriced. Oh well. (Note: This sale was ALSO by the same people who did the House of Horrors sale and the antique cigar stand sale. They love overpricing things.) 

Anyway, I got my brother this vintage Michigan State pennant for his man cave. I think he reads this blog, so I’m ruining a surprise. It’s probably from the '50s…if I had to guess. 

I also found this amazing book, called The Crazy Ladies by Joyce Elbert. I’m not familiar with her work, but as you can see from the blurb by Cosmo at the top, it is the first really great dirty book. 

I think Cosmo is probably wrong about this claim, but it was still a great find because clearly someone had kept this book just for the sexy parts. I know this because when I opened it, this happened: 

It reminded me of the copy of Jackie Collins’ Chances that was in my grandma’s basement when I was a kid. I would go downstairs and pretend I had to use the bathroom down there, and just read the dirty parts. My family probably thought I had extreme bowel problems (I’m neither confirming or denying this.) The book looked just like that by the end of my tween years. 

I flipped through it this morning, and didn’t find anything particularly racy. However, the first page is great, and I don’t know how this happened, but it’s like a picture-perfect description of the way I throw parties: 

I found some other cool stuff at the sale, most notably these postcards, a Swedish Christmas ornament, and a Greenfield Village pennant, all vintage: 

Next, we went to a sale at the home of a woman who was clearly a compulsive shopper, and I scored two purses and three pairs of Naturalizer dress shoes in my size that looked like they’d never been worn. You might say that’s a grandma brand to wear, but I was thrilled because a) the shoes are all cute, b) I hate looking for dress shoes when I have to go to a wedding or something, and c) each pair was only $5. 

Related sidenote: I first started hanging out with Erin, we were at this wedding and I complimented her whole ensemble, which was lovely. She then told me that her shoes were NATURE-alizer brand like it was real cool. First, nice pronunciation skills. Second, that’s not something you want to walk around advertising when you’re 22 or 23 (which she was at the time.) 

At the last two sales of the day, I scored some decent items, including cool wrapping paper to add to my collection (I remember making things out of fabric that was the same pattern as the paper to the right when I was a kid), an antique shelf, some cool vintage cheese picks for all of the entertaining that I do, and a cat pin with a head that wobbles. 

All in all, not the best day, but not the worst either. Until I lost at the casino and had to drive home from Erin’s in the snow, coughing and sneezing my brains out. 

-Sarah