Spring is in the air

 It’s that time of year when the world buys your junk 

I’m a laidback garage sale entrepreneur, which means I get up lazily in the morning, draw open the sash, and peek outside to see if anyone within a two block range is putting up signs and setting out their wares. Spending money on fancy garage sale signs never made much sense to me. Aren’t you supposed to be making money?

Then for a couple of hours, I get paid to clean and organize my garage. That attached structure once designated for housing automobiles, is now a stockpile of odds and ends, the last stop drop by anyone who comes through my doors. Every time one person moves out, someone else brings back half-packed boxes and bags of junk. And do they put the mess out of the way? No, they stack toss it in the garage wherever.

Right to sell is ninety percent possession. I’m an “on demand” wholesaler. I ask what you want, and then dig through unknown contents to see if I can meet your needs. Some boxes are too ominous to open, so I just sell them sealed as “mystery” gifts.

Anyone want to take a stab at what this item is? It came in on the last dump and run load from Coco, daughter #2. It has thin legs and lights up when you plug it in. I’m thinking a prototype for a horror flick called The Lamp of the Living Dead.

I get rid of my trash others’ treasures really cheap. Isn’t that the idea of a yard sale? Not to relocate it back into the garage.

I got a great deal a couple of months ago at a Home Depot closeout that I couldn’t resist — flame tipped chandelier light bulbs for one penny. Not 1¢ a bulb, but a box of fifteen for $.01. Did it matter that I didn’t own a chandelier? Not at that price. I bought 26 boxes. Today I offered them at the bargain rate of $3 a box. That windfall almost makes up for the wool sweater I just had to have last winter for a mere $85. It left my possession today for a whopping 25¢.

After I’ve got a few coins in my pocket, the garage emptier than it was when I started, and the morning rush gone, I close up shop. I load the leftovers in my SAV (suburban assault vehicle) and head off to the nearest Salvation Army. That still leaves me with enough time to do my own bargain hunting.

My finds have been pretty impressive. I purchased a gallon jug of Wilhold glue at a yard sale thirty years ago for $2.50. I still have half of it left today. If you calculate that price over the years, I practically stole it. When I was a young girl, I remember a story in Reader’s Digest about a family who survived in the desert for days with what they had in their car. Naturally, one of those items was a bottle of white glue that they wisely used as a milk substitute. With everyone so big on survival kits, I’m ahead of the curve.

I also purchased 25 yards of muslin, and they threw in a really cute Santa ornament. It’s too bad the top of his hat is broken off.

When the sum of the mass of what I buy is slightly less than what I sold, I head home.

I was reading about a lucky guy on Snopes.com. In 2006, he “happened upon a yellowed, shellacked, rolled-up document” in a thrift store. He bought it for $2.48. He later auctioned it — one of only two hundred “official copies” of the Declaration of Independence — where it fetched $477.650.

Makes my Wilhold glue deal sound a little less spectacular.