I don’t know about you but  in my neck of the woods summer means a lot of things but mostly it’s prime sale season, garage and estate sales that is. While technically estate sales go on all year their prime time, at least in northern states, is definitely during the summer. My mom has always been a sale junkie but this addiction has reached new heights since she found estatesales.net, a website that e-mails you all the estate sales listed within 100 miles of your zip code. It’s a great tool that not only lets you know where the closest estate sales are but also provides pictures and descriptions of everything for sale. I find the pictures the most helpful as you can automatically eliminate sales. This allows you to save time and gas money only visiting the sales with stuff you actually like.

Estate and garage sales are a great way of finding lots of cheap goods, but when it comes to clothes they can be a crap shoot. Sales are a fairly easy goldmine for housewares with tons of dishes, kinck-knacks, furniture, bedding etc. But when it comes to clothes things are a bit more tricky. Since your generally looking through the stuff of one family, couple, or one person sizes and styles can be fairly limited. I look through the clothes anyway since, generally, there aren’t many for sale and you can sometimes find great vintage clothes at prices lower than vintage and even thrift stores.  Jewelry and other accessories, though, are plentiful.

If you’re searching for deals garage sales are probably your best bet. Estate sales are great but a lot of them are put on by companies that research and know the worth of the items, unlike Joe blow who just wants to get rid of some stuff. This isn’t to say you can’t get a good deal at an estate sale, just that you may be able to get better deals at garage sales.

Since I don’t have my own place, at sales I usually focus on clothing and accessories first then browse the housewares for good finds. This year I haven’t found  a ton of stuff, partly because of low funds and partly because I’m not really in the market for lots of housewares. Anyway I did find some cool stuff so I figured I’d share my sale booty thus far. First up is this vintage 60’s (I think) chair. We got this chair at a garage sale we stumbled upon while driving back from a rather disappointing estate sale. It was only 5 bucks and it’s in pretty good condition. I haven’t decided  what I want to do with the chair. I could clean it up and keep it as is or paint it, I’m still undecided. For now it’s become colonized by the kitties who have taken it up as one of their favorite new napping spots and coated the seat with a good spread of cat hair. Eventually it will go in my room but I just can’t bare to move this new cat obsession quite yet, so it stays rather randomly placed in our living room.

Second up is a random haul of cheap 80’s/90’s earrings. Recently I’ve been kind of into slightly over sized gold-ish studs that I think are sort of 80’s/90′. So imagine my luck when upon walking into an estate sale the organizers announce that in order to get rid of as much stuff as possible they’d take 5 dollars for everything you can fit into a paper grocery bag. After grabbing a paper bag I headed immediately to the bedroom and straight to the jewelry where I threw any earrings I found remotely interesting in the bag. The result was a rather impressive haul of cheap earrings that, along with the other stuff my mom later added to the bag, cost me less than 5 bucks.

All the jewelry I got at the sale

My favorites

Since sale-ing is sport I often participate in I figured this segment will morph into a regular feature on the blog showcasing  my good sale loot. Also, though I named estatesales.net this is not a sponsored post, that just happens to be the website I use. I’m sure there are other great sites out there so if you use a different one let me know!