Dig This Treasure!

It was a lazy Sunday around our household today so Zach decided to throw some things up on Craigslist.  He had a bunch of NES games from chidhood, and I had some leftover from a college boyfriend whose possessions pop up in random storage boxes around here from time to time.

There were 22 games in total which Zach decided to sell in one giant lot.  I figured they were worth about $2 a piece, so I recommended asking $50 for all of them.  We would then wait to be lowballed and accept that offer.  Zach ended up asking $60 for all of them, but hoped someone would offer like $35.

Here is a photo of just 4 of them from the Craigslist ad.  Perhaps if you’re a Nintendo collector, you will look at this photo and immediately know the road that this story is about to go down.

Anyway, I went and ran some errands, so what happens next is all Zach’s fault.  He starts getting inundated with text messages and emails of people wanting to buy the games.  There were literally 15 texts, emails, and calls within 20 minutes of the listing going up.

Now, call me crazy, but if it were me at the helm, my Spidey sense would be on overdrive. 

One dude texted this:

You guys, Ortonville is OVER AN HOUR AWAY from our house!  If the alarm bells weren’t ringing before, they are certainly blasting now.  This guy was willing to drive an hour, in the snow, AND give us more money than we were asking for.

So after the games are sold, Zach has this little exchange:

WTF?! You’re telling me that Chip and Dale 2 is worth $150 ON ITS OWN.  FFS.  What kind of world…

Yep, sure enough:

I guess we (Zach) should’ve done our (his) homework.  Basically this is a shout-out to all of you to go tear through your video game stash.  If that stash only contains Xbox games though, you’re out of luck, as made evident by this guy:

-Erin

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…

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. 

Oh, and also this teeny tiny cow. 

My total, including the really awesome cool find that I can’t blog about, was $6.50. WTF?! 

Stay tuned for the second part of this story! 

On Monday, I hit up the secret auction with Adam and we met my parents there. As I’ve said in the past, this auction often has a mix of garbage and gems. But that night, basically everything up for auction was hilarious. 

Saw these homies right away. They were each about 2 feet tall. 

I have a deep love for Beavis and Butthead so this was really hard to resist. 

Nothing better than a Tweety Bird needlepoint. 

That, my friends, is a HUGE plastic Halloween mask–the eye holes are up in the hat area. 

In the end, I came away with a cool set of playing cards with naked ladies on them, and a pile of paper, including this awesome antique invite to a “social hop”!

There were two things that Adam wanted, both of which sold for way too much money. First, there was an Eddie Cantor game amongst these huge piles of old games. Someone ended up buying each stack for between $70 and $40, and the pile with Eddie Cantor went for the most. 

But the main thing Adam wanted was this box of NES games in their original packaging. He was most excited about this lot because it contained a Flinstones game, and one of the two NES Flinstones games is worth a boatload. 

This box contained the less valuable game, but still probably would have had a high resell value. However, it ended up going for $90. C'mon y'all. 

-Sarah