Dig This Treasure!

A few weeks ago, Sarah and I vacationed together in South Haven, MI.  It was glorious.  Lake Michigan was not only surprisingly warm, but super clear.  I’m down with being a lake person, but you bet your ass that I wear water shoes.  In Lake Michigan, I didn’t even need to!  It wasn’t gross at all!  Yay nature!

We spent a lot of time swimming and lounging, but also made time to go antiquing.  The go-to strategy among dealers here seemed to be setting up shop on your front lawn.  We saw a lot of antiques just laying in people’s yards, with little explanation to how they survive the elements or if any effort is even made to protect them from rain or theft. 

It looked like American Pickers, where the dudes just drive around and look for people with junk outside.  They call it “freestylin” on the show, but because I am a disgusting and juvenile person, I kept telling Sarah we were “freeballin.”  We just drove around until we found places to stop.

And boy did we find a place…

The place we found was called something like “Junktiques” which was a fair and honest assessment.  It turned out to also be some dude’s life work of creating arguably insane art.  In true Sarah fashion, she told the guy that his sculptures made her laugh, which the guy reacted to with a blank stare. 

TBH, the sculptures were funny and also totally delightful.  I would put one in my backyard in a heartbeat.

All I bought from this bro were some cookie cutters for Everett to use with Play-Dough. I did not buy this life-size wood carving of Sarah.

Also did not buy this hilarious elephant.

And I did not buy this mask, even though I looked great in it.

We also stopped at a nice little shop inside a house, which was clearly geared towards shabby chic moms (me, basically). 

I wanted to buy that big metal ball and put Christmas lights in it, but decided not to because the woman revealed it was from a wholesale gardening place.  I figured I could find one cheaper online since that was the case.

I did end up buying some cool wooden slats that I plan to put in my garden.

And I got this neat old egg carton to put up by my egg scales.  It was so darn cute and only $8!

Zach and Adam went out shopping too, without us.  Zach bought this giant painting of a dude yelling? crying? who knows…

If someone can identify this man, that would be awesome.  I want to know so badly who he is and what he is doing.  He lives in our living room now.

I am lol’ing hard at the amount of bags I have hanging on the dining room chairs.  Apparently I need two purses, a gym bag, and a backpack to exist in life.

And just for a little life update, here are our dudes!  Everett will be 3 in October! Arden will be 2 in November!

Cheers!

-Erin

I had a really epic weekend of estate sales a few weeks back.  My purchases don’t really attest to that, but I FOR SURE visited some of the gnarliest houses ever.  This entry will be split into two parts because I took a million photos.  Keep an eye out for part two soon, in which Zach bolts from a house as soon as we enter it.

The first day of sales began pretty normally.  I visited a house that was full of treasures, lots of vintage military items and nice Christmas items.  I was the first one to the sale, although it was the second day.  I sat in my car for awhile and enjoyed the first snow of the season. 

Damn right I’m listening to Detroit’s Christmas station, WNIC.  Also, I should note, this was pre-Thanksgiving.  GET OUT OF THE WAY THANKSGIVING.

The problem with this sale was that everything was super overpriced.  It was so bad that people were audibly complaining. The guy running the sale finally shouted out, “OK! IGNORE THE PRICE TAGS.  JUST ASK ME AND I’LL TELL YOU THE PRICE.”  This created a new problem, which was a house full of people asking one dude prices for everything.  It was chaos.

This same guy was also straight up yelling at his employees, which was very uncomfortable.  They couldn’t do anything right.  One grandma-looking lady said to me, “All he does is yell at me.”  And I said, “I see that.”  It was a cry for help.  I told her to blink once if she needed me to secretly evacuate her from the property.

I didn’t buy much, although I did want this authentic Purple Heart from WWII.  Turns out though, these are actually fairly easy to come by, and sell for about $100 on ebay.  Also, I just realized how awful that sounds.  These aren’t “fairly easy to come by” for the people receiving them initially, just for terrible people who buy and resell them on ebay.

I did end up buying this book about booby traps.  I paid $5 and later sold it for $40 on ebay.  I know, I know, I JUST mentioned terrible people who resell.  I am one of them, just not when it comes to war medals.

I also bought some utensils from WWI.  I paid $10 for the set and sold them on ebay for $35.

So after this sale, I headed to one in my own neighborhood.  I had heard from other neighbors that the house was a total disaster, but I figured I had already seen worse.

From the outside, things looked pretty normal.

What is so sad about the photos I am about to post is that this house was super super nice underneath all the filth.  The layout was really cool and everything looked retro, but not tacky retro.  It would be a nice home for a vintage-loving family. 

I actually love a good hoarder sale.  Our best sale ever was technically a hoarder sale. The problem here though was that this house was LITERALLY full of garbage.  I do not mean that I personally classified the items inside as useless or meaningless.  What I mean is that nearly everything I saw was meant to be thrown away.  For example, there were tons of empty food containers.  TWICE I found an empty pizza box inside of a garbage bag.

It was so bizarre.  I cannot believe the people running this sale agreed to open up.  I didn’t see anyone buying anything.  It was basically gawkers watching a car crash.

That porn was maybe the one viable purchase in the house.  Still, it sat unclaimed. 

It was so bad that the deemed “garbage” had to be labeled.

There was one gem that came out of this sale, which was the following exchange I overheard:

Neighbor: Didn’t this house have a fire a few years back?

Guy running the sale: Yeah, a big one.  Everything burned up.

Neighbor: Oh really?

Guy running the sale: Yep. All the real good old stuff, it done burned right up.  Nice antiques and stuff.  Burned it all right up.

OH OK COOL.  WHY ARE WE HERE?!  That is what I was screaming in my head.

What I didn’t know at the time of this sale was that things can actually get MUCH MUCH worse.  The next day, Zach and I would visit a sale so horrendous that Zach actually walked out upon seeing the living room.  Stay tuned for part two!

-Erin