Learning the ropes of thrifting

A few weekends ago, I went out with my friend, M, and her mom and aunt, the garage sale gurus. I wanted to learn from the masters and M offered that I ride along [sounds like a police-thing, doesn’t it?] on what it supposedly one of the best neighborhood garage sales in the area.

This neighborhood nearby hosts its garage sale each year around the same time. The city hall even creates maps of all the houses that are participating each year and passes out signs for people to put in their yards to make it easier to find the houses. It’s really a great idea! The houses are so cute that when Husband and I start looking, this is definitely an area we’ll start looking at first.

At the first house, the four of us got out of the car and made a bee lien for the tables. I found a few Tupperware containers there and was kind of intrigued. Those things are really expensive new and even though I’d been wanting them for a while, I didn’t want to spend the money.

But the other ladies didn’t find anything at the house, so we went on to the next few down the street. But I kept thinking about the Tupperware and decided to stop back at that house on the way back to the car. M’s aunt, the real master, went with me to make sure she could coach me in The Garage Sale Way.

I asked the lady how much for the containers and she thought about it for a moment (there wasn’t a tag on them or anything) and said she’d sell all three for a dollar. I said I thought I could do that! After we’d exchanged cash, she said she thought there was a fourth container that matched the set and that I should take that one too. :)

I ended up with four Tupperware cereal containers for $1, pajama pants with penguins on them for $0.50 and a Weight Watchers 20 minute cookbook for $0.50.

All in all, I’m starting to get the hang of it, spending a morning going to garage sales. :)