Would You Buy This or Not? (Nokomis/Saint Anthony Park, 2011)

This contains previously unreleased material from the summer of 2011.   I have about two dozen such posts in queue, and will finish them over time.  It only makes sense to present this in the winter, when I'm not trying to figure out where to put it all!

[A little background for first time visitors to these posts: Janie and I have the yard sale bug bad. We live in one of the best yard sale cities there is - Minneapolis/St. Paul, and we buy almost all our clothing, cookware, electronics, furniture, etc., at a fraction of actual value. We resell to used book stores, retro stores, the scrap yard and people I just happen to know are looking for something in particular. A lot of what we find goes into our own mega-garage-sale we hold every year in Ouray, Colorado on the 4th of July and subsequent weekends. Some things we buy just because they're so fun they have to be in our sale! The true gems we set aside for the opening inventory of our own shop. And, we have one heck of an Ebay-someday box.]

Find of the day

Marble table

Price - $20; sold

Within the marble, you can see a number of marine fossils. Score.

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Other noteworthy things

E.P. Shaw ginger beer and Coco Mariani bottles

Price - $6 and 15 cents, respectively; sold

Blue head

Price - $1; sold

Motors

Price - $1 each; sold

One was for all practical purposes new.

The other I sold for scrap (all motors have a bundle of copper inside.

Porter Cable nail gun

Price - $15; sold

Craftsman cordless drills

Prlce - $1 each; sold

One was burned up; the other I use to this day and it runs great. The batteries take only a couple minutes to charge enough to use, which is really handy if you run out of power just at the end of a project.

Record collection

Price - $5; sold

Granted, a great many of these were Bobby Sherman and Carpenters and such, but I took them to a used book store, where the buyers are less picky than the used record store. I believe I got about $20.

Porta-Nailers (2, with nails and carrying case)

Price - $20; sold

 The can of vegetables is added for perspective in size.  I believe I sold this for $70.  It was one of my earlier lessons in being willing to pay real money for things.

Cow skulls

Price - $10 each; no sale

I could of course sell these for $20 in Colorado, but they're fragile and take up too much space.

"Brass" bed

Price - $40; no sale

Always bring a magnet.  This wasn't brass at all.  Even as a bed, the color is off, though I only checked it for its scrap potential.

There were a number of other smaller items we purchased.  See the photos attached to this post. 

Ron Hall (that's me). I'm a major gift fundraising researcher and writer of federal grants that bring isolated populations their first access to public radio. I write this weekly yard saling blog "Would You Buy This or Not?". My tutorial How to Split Wood has 25,000 views and counting. Writing dysfunctional love songs and posting them to Gather also keeps me amused.

Janie is a guide and floor staff at the Minnesota Children's Museum and Minnesota History Center. She also has become a celebrity of sorts among Twin Cities children aged 2 to 7.

If you'd like to read more, just google "would you buy this or not". Don't forget the quotes, and tell Google to ignore what it thinks are duplicate results. You'll find scores of earlier episodes.