Bargain garage sale

Lesterday, [doh! typo; but would be cool if my name was ''Lester'' -- I'd use it a lot], on Saturday, I stopped by an estate sale that was on the other side of the block. Of course, since we're semi-rural, our blocks are something like a quarter mile by a half mile.

As I browsed, chatted with the nice lady who was running it. Her dad had died about four years ago, and her mom had been in a nursing home for a bit, and died three months ago. Supposedly, her mother knew my wife's mother -- went to school together.

No price stickers. I asked about the pricing, and the lady said to just make a pile, and we'd negotiate something.

Maybe because there was only two hours to go (2pm; closing at 4pm) and they were down to the stuff they just wanted to get rid of, I got a heck of a deal:

• a kid's bicycle (for The Kid, in a year or so)
• a wheelchair (for shooting films and music videos: cheaper than a dolly)
• a leather pocketknife pouch on a leather belt
• three CDs of Aussie traditional (folk) tunes
• a cylindrical piece of wood about 15cm in diam and as long as my leg
• a wooden rolling pin (no moving parts; maybe use as a paper towel holder?)
• a yellow plastic kick board
• hedge trimming shears with a wooden handle
• a small eggbeater-style hand drill, and
• a wooden tool tote of old plywood, about 19cm x 58cm x 28cm tall

All for ten dollars. (The low price might have been because I was friendly; or because my wife's gran knew their mum.)

I phoned my sister-in-law, and she and I niece nipped out there and bought a bicycle, a dresser mirror, two folding chairs with wooden slats, and had two metal tool boxes thrown in for free. They paid fourty bucks, though.

When my brother-in-law went back there to help retrieve the larger items, I succumbed to my ''second thoughts'' over five mis-matched golf clubs that I'd passed up. I gave him some money and asked him to make them an offer. Which apparently succeeded. IIRC, the golf clubs were a 1-wood, a 3-wood, a 2-iron, a 4-iron, and an ''S''-iron. Two bucks.

Here's a closer shot of the tool-like items (from top: tool tote; rolling pin and pocketknife pouch with belt; log;hedge clipper; hand drill). No specific use for the wooden rolling pin and the log, but they'll come in handy eventually. After my BIL came back with the golf clubs, I realized that there had been an auger bit and a decent-looking file there, as well as a larger wooden tool tote (missing the dowel-handle), that I had passed up as being impractically large (if you filled it, you couldn't lift it). Should've grabbed them as well -- but, oh well.


--GG