Head Tale

I’m a garage sale addict at the best of times – who can resist finding something that someone else paid $20 or $100 for and being able to buy it for pennies on the dollar?  Plus part of the addiction is how random it is – like the slot machine in a casino, you never know what you might find when you pull up at a house with some balloons on a tree out front!

This year was extra fun for hitting garage sales because we had a seasonal camp site that we needed a few things for and buying at garage sales freed up our money to be wasted on other things. 😉

Here are some of my best purchases…
1. DVD Movies (most for $1-$2) – I started hitting garage sales in early May and one of the main things on my list was to flesh out our DVD collection since we don’t own a lot of movies ourselves anymore but I knew it would be good to have a few movies in the camper for those rainy days or some kids’ movies if we had “Tailgate Theatre” using our rear garage’s TV capability (as we did a couple times this summer.)

2. Double Folding Chair ($25) – I actually found this item at a garage sale a few years ago and it was a good deal – sturdy, a woven basket underneath plus various pouches in the front made it more than the sum of a couple single $9.99 folding chair specials from Canadian Tire (which is what I usually use)  I didn’t use it much when we first got it but once we got to our seasonal site, it was my favourite chair – at least until my parents gave us a gift of two anti-gravity chairs mid-way through the season!

3. Xmas Lights – I already had some extra outdoor Christmas lights that I was planning to take to decorate our site but at a random garage sale on the way out of town one day early in the season, I stumbled upon a person with a 5 gallon pail of a number of strings of Xmas lights for $5.  How could anyone turn down a deal like that?  I bought them, *most* of them even worked, and they became extra lights for our site on top of the ones I already had.  Heck, the person even threw in the 5G pail and that’s going to cost you a few bucks for a new one normally too!

4. CD Player – even though our camper has a radio and outdoor speakers plus I can also stream most radio stations using my phone and a Bluetooth speaker (mainly 620 CKRM for Rider games), I still wanted a regular CD player that I could move around the site, carry to other places (eg. beach) as required and so on.  I was on my way back from an ice run at a nearby convenience store when I saw the sign for a garage sale on the Pasqua First Nation.  So with a bag of ice melting in my vehicle, I went to check it out and of course they had a CD player for a whopping $2. Sure, one of the buttons didn’t work and it was pretty grungy.  But once I confirmed it could pick up 620, it was sold!

5. Blake Berglund CD – I’ve already mentioned that Blake Berglund’s “Coyote” album became my unofficial soundtrack of the summer, almost by accident after I randomly put that album first on a “Saskatchewan artists only” playlist I created.  I kept listening to it from a streaming service but halfway through summer, we hit another garage sale in Fort Qu’Appelle and what was the only CD they had for sale?  The Blake Berglund double-album featuring “Jasper” which is a live recording and “Coyote”!

I happened to get to introduce myself to Blake who was at the “Symphony Under the Sky” concert at the end of the summer and told him this story. He joked that he thinks Value Village is the main distributor of his album and I realised it’s probably not good form to tell an independent artist that you bought their album secondhand. Luckily, he has a new release that just came out on September 1 and I bought that the old-fashioned way – er, pre-ordering the digital download on iTunes – even though it’s also available for streaming as part of your $9.99/month fee.  Finding this CD was a double bonus as it gave me something I could play on my new $2 CD player as well! 😉