Coffee heat rising

estate sales

Bargains and Such-a-Deals

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A few days ago, La Maya and I made a run on a couple of estate sales. The first place was disappointing—looked a lot better in the online photos than it was. But at the second place we both found some loot.

Check out this fine junk:

EstateSaleLoot

That pan, which I’d call a brazier or braising pan, was part of a large set of aluminum-core stainless steel. Wolfgang Puck. Not a bad pan, not the best, but more than good enough for government work. Similar Wolfgang Pucks on the market are going for $30, which is what I paid for the entire collection of valuables.

These folks decorated in the 1980; hence lots of blue and pink. The blue and pink mugs seem to be pretty good quality stoneware. They’re not signed, but they’re high-fired and in good condition. There actually are four of them–two are in the dishwasher just now.

My beloved yellow-and-blue mugs from Pier One have crazed on the inside. They still look pretty on the outside, but the cracked interiors have soaked up enough coffee and tea stains as to be more or less uncleanable, this side of soaking them in Clorox. An exercise in futility: bleach the stains out and the next time you pour a cup of tea, you have the map of the crevasses of Mars again. These dated pink-and-blue fellows will do until I spot (and can afford) another set that inspires love in my heart.

And in spite of the equally dated pink and blue design on the little Italian dish, it has some real charm. Seen in a context completely devoid of pink and blue, it ceases to cry “1988” and looks like a sweet little decorator item.

The Chantal knockoff teakettle is a Kuhn-Rikon. The amount they charge for those things new is a little on the startling side. On the other hand, the newer models look like they’ve undergone some improvements. This one is all stainless steel, including its (wonderfully loud!) whistle and its handle. It’s not surprising that the steel whistle would get too hot to pull off without a potholder. But the handle? You can’t touch the handle, either, after you’ve boiled water in it.

Come on! All my stainless pans have steel handles that stay cool unless you put them in the oven.

So that was disappointing. The blue Le Creuset that resides in the kitchen now (and will continue to reside there) has a plasticoid handle and whistle, both of which stay cool on the stove. You can grab the whistle with your bare hands the instant live steam stops shooting out. Part of the connection that holds the handle on has chipped, moderately alarming, but it’s been like that for a couple of years and shown no sign of falling apart.

That model of Le Creuset was the perfect teakettle: pretty design, no ersatz early-American look, audible whistle, easy to use, well made. Well, naturally, like any manufacturer, the instant Le Creuset sensed it had made a perfect product, they yanked it off the market. That kettle is no longer available. Of course.

Speaking of bargains and near bargains, how d’you like my new dining room chair covers?

DiningRoomChairs

Mwa ha ha! Bet you can’t guess where that fabric came from!

Might be nice...but who knows?

I’ve been searching for something to go with the orange wall (which is not, as the picture suggests, puce) that would look Southwestern, Provençal, or Mediterranean. Nothing. It’s either hideous flowers or bizarre geometrics or ghastly colors.

Drove all over the city looking for fabric. Nothing. A couple of places online had some pretty fabrics, but most of them were a bit on the oh dear! side. Some that looked really neat online could have been anything by the time they arrived in the mail and spread themselves over the chairs.

Not so long ago, M’hijito and I went lurking in Pier One, searching for a small desk of the sort he envisioned but could not see on this earthly plane. And lo! There I found the fabric.

What was it? Curtains.

Window curtains. Not only that, but they were on sale! I got them for a nice discount.

Why didn’t I think of this before? A curtain is, at base, a length off a bolt of fabric with hems on four sides. One panel provided enough to cover all four chairs, and then some.

There’s enough left over to make Cassie a collar. If I could just find some interfacing. Doesn’t anyone sew around here anymore?

Shopping estate sales for deals

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Five-Cent Nickel features a nice guest post by Craig Ford, proprietor of Money Help for Christians. Craig holds forth on ways and places to find a good deal, among them yard sales. Just last night, I was congratulating myself for having found one of my all-time best buys—a deluxe “Rabbit” wine opener that normally sells for as much as a hundred bucks—at an estate sale. I picked it up for five bucks.

Estate sales are different from yard sales in several big ways.

• A true estate sale is organized by professionals. Estate sale operators are companies and so must charge sales tax. They have a good feel for what things are worth (usually less than the homeowner thinks), and they usually do a nice job of organizing the merchandise.

• Estate sales are generally held inside the house and in the back yard, so you get to see how other people live.

• And some of the other people live mighty high off the hog. Estate sales often take place in multimillion-dollar homes, sometimes owned by people who can afford to maintain several places and who, when selling a house, simply dispose of all the designer furnishings and redecorate the next place from scratch.

• Estate sales may take place in gated communities and HOAs where ordinary yard sales are not permitted.

• Nine times out of ten, the offerings at an estate sale are much, much nicer than anything you find at a yard sale. Often you’ll find expensive items that are barely used or even brand-new.

In addition to the Rabbit, which I use a couple of times a week, I’ve bought high-quality cutlery, a beautiful set of coveted Tonalaware, a matching red leather sofa and recliner for M’hijito’s house, a fun leather ottoman for my own place, a gorgeous custom-made library table, upscale cookbooks, and any number of tschotchkies, yard items, and household gadgets.

The trick to estate sales is finding out about them and then getting there before they open. An easy way to find an estate sale in your area is to go to Estatesales.net and subscribe. At the site, you can click on your state and then your city to find a list of nearby sales. It’s even easier to subscribe; this will elicit a weekly e-mail listing of upcoming events, and the e-mail generally tells you whether and where the estate-sale company has posted photos.

A listing with photos is especially useful, because you get a feel for whether a given sale has goods that may interest you, and you waste a lot less time than you do wandering from yard sale to yard sale.

Remember, though, that you will be competing with antique and second-hand dealers. This means you need to get there early! Be there a half-hour before the door opens, and be prepared to stand in line. If a sale is really hot, the organizers will let only 15 or 20 people in at a time, for safety and for the sake of maintaining order. The dealers are always there as dawn cracks, and they go straight to the best stuff.

It’s smart to bring a basket, box, or shopping bag, so you’re not having to balance things in one hand while you inspect the merchandise. Also, some people will bring their own tags marked with their name and SOLD. Usually you claim an item by removing the tag or picking it up and carrying it over to the cashier’s table, but not everyone knows an untagged item is considered “sold.”

Estate sales are a lot of fun, not only because you sometimes score a fantastic deal but because you get to see some amazing real estate, some interesting antiques, and some expensive designer furniture. La Maya even found her house in our neighborhood at an estate sale. She visited the estate sale, having found it in a weekly e-mail notice, and once inside she realized she loved the beautiful house. When she asked the estate-sale organizer if the owners were planning to sell, the answer was yes! Instantly she called her partner, who agreed that it was a perfect place for them, and before long they were living around the corner from me. Now there’s an estate-sale triumph!

Estate-saling in a tropical storm

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La Maya and a cousin of La Bethulia’s dropped by early this morning to pick me up on the way to an estate sale in the fancy part of a far-flung arm of the galaxy. The house was located in the elegant suburbs of far, far, far north Scottsdale.

Actually, it dwelt in a small patch of tract houses surrounded by large, expensive late-model houses on acre-plus lots. The tract itself consisted of modestly sized structures—maybe 1,600 to 2,000 square feet—on typical tiny tract lots, what we dinosaurs would call “patio homes” but today’s mammals think of as full-sized family houses. Its saving grace was that its tiny backyard looked out over a vast swath of undisturbed open space, giving it a view across only lightly raped Sonoran desert all the way to the mountains that ring the Valley. Very pretty. Maybe even pretty enough to justify the $600,000 asking price for three tiny bedrooms, a single living area dominated by a wall of ungainly niches built to house a hulking television and an array of large speakers, and not a single wall anywhere broad enough to hold a decent bookcase.

At any rate, the owner had a flair for decorating. We got there a little late to grab the nicest things, but we did see a nice array of lovely Asian pottery and ceramics, many beautiful clothes (once incredibly expensive but all, alas, in the smaller petite sizes), and some very nice artwork. But Gini, the sale proprietor, kept slipping new things onto the countertops as buyers cleared the merchandise, and so, stepping into the kitchen at just the right moment, I scored this nice old carving set:

The blades are carbon steel, a feature much coveted in the Aptosaurus family. M’hijito loves the carbon-steel knives I passed to him after SDXB nabbed them in a yard sale and gave them to me. Tho’ they’re softer than stainless and can’t be left to corrode in a puddle of water on the drainboard, they sharpen easily and take a beautiful edge.

See those little decorative collars at the top end of the handles? Those are marked “sterling.” There’s no maker’s mark on the blade or fork, but the sterling silver deco touch suggests they’re good pieces, like everything else the woman owned. I think the handles may be bone or possibly horn, not plastic. And the blade has been sharpened many times.* The pieces have a little corrosion, as if they were put away and forgotten at some point. I’ll bet the owner inherited it, or else acquired it early in her marriage and kept it all her adult life.

Meanwhile… The tail end of Hurricane Jimena has been drifting north across the Chihuahan and Sonoran deserts, and now it has ambled into the Valley. On the way home we passed through a sharp storm cell, the lightning copious and the rain ferocious. About the time we hit the freeway it really started to fire-hose. People were pulling off onto the shoulder, but La Maya managed to make it to an offramp several miles north of our neighborhood. This put us in the middle of an electrical storm. At one point a lightning bolt struck just a few yards from us. Its C-R-R-A-C-K and BOOM shook La Maya’s sturdy RAV-4 and all three of us yelped at once!

But we outran it a little south of Thunderbird, where the North Mountains blocked the blustery clouds’ passage long enough for us to run ahead of the rain and lightning until we reached our part of town. We were mighty glad to see the rain, and just as glad to get off the road and inside a building!

It caught up with us as I was running from the car to the front door. Just had time to power down and unplug the Mac (which I had stupidly left sleeping despite the encroaching storm) and heat some breakfast before the lightning threatened to fry the local power lines. Now the noise and heavy downpour have come and gone, and we have a lovely steady rain, temperatures in the balmiest of mid-seventies. Lovely!

Next week will be very busy. I’ve fallen behind in my plan to stockpile posts, and so today’s post is today’s post. But have many things to share and so will carve out as much time as I can find this weekend to write and schedule the next few days’ entries. If I miss a day or two, it’s not because I’ve forgotten you but because this fall’s expected flood of work is starting to rise.

* BTW, here’s an interesting article on sharpening fine blades, the most thorough explanation I’ve ever see this side of my Daddy’s workbench.

Storm image: FIR002, flagstaffotos.com.au Lightning strike, January 2007
Licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License
Please note that this image is not in the public domain and must be used and acknowledged accordingly.