Have you ever been to an estate sale? If not, you really should try it sometime. It’s fun for multiple reasons.
First, you never know what cool thing you might find that you could never get from any online store or local retailer. People acquire the oddest and most awesome stuff throughout their lives. In a certain way, it’s kind of fun to explore people’s lives through looking at the stuff they owned.
Kind of like this THING
Which leads me to the second reason. The stuff people collect is an interesting glimpse into the kind of person they are or the unique lives they lived. People buy design magazines and watch reality TV all the time just to see how the other half lives. Unfortunately, I don’t feel like any of that is really real life. For example, interior design images are staged and photoshopped, while reality TV is anything but. However, just take a walk through someone’s house and be amazed at what you will find. Every person is different and the things they collect are just as unique they are. At one house you will find someone who collected porcelain dolls then at another house there will be a garage full of woodworking tools. The exploration of these houses are mostly fun, sometimes scary, but interesting all the same. You can use your imagination and try to figure how this person or family lived day to day. I don’t know if that’s weird to some people, but we think it’s entertaining.
My wife and I have been going to estate sales for years, even before our baby girl was born. We used have a booth in a local resale shop where we sold antique and vintage items such as clothing, housewares, knick knacks, etc. My wife has be a thrifter since she was a teenager. So once we got the booth it was kind of a passion turned part time job for her. It was a weekend hobby of ours for a good while. We would search the web for estate sales in our area, and then plan our weekend around the good sales. Sometimes we would drive an hour or more just TRYING to get a certain item.
We had taken a break from going to estates sales for a while because it is WAY too easy to acquire a lot of stuff for cheap, sometimes stuff you might not even need. However, we decided to go to one in our old neighborhood yesterday just for fun. Actually, my wife said they had a bunch of shovels and tools so I went in search of those items specifically. On that hunt, I came across an item I wasn’t necessarily looking for but needed nonetheless. It was a pole saw. Always handy to have around a house with big, mature trees. It’s just a simple saw attached to a stick, not gas or electric, but perfect for what I would use it for. And, it was only $3.
What made it even more awesome then just being cheap is that it was homemade. Just a long stick, looks kind of like a hockey stick handle, with a saw attached to the end with bolts. Genius!! It’s a simple DIY project that I would have never thought about if I hadn’t seen it, so I bought it. DIY pole saw for $3 …and I didn’t have to do the work myself. Win, win…WINNING!!!
So I suggest going to your first estate sale is you haven’t been, or maybe going again if you haven’t been in a while like us. It is just astonishing the interesting things you can find there, and the prices are way better than retail, for the most part. Have Fun Estate Saling! And send us pics of the cool stuff you find.
Leave a Reply