The Thrill of the Hunt

I love tag sales and estate sales. I just love them. Something about finding a treasure for a great price lifts my spirits, tickles my happy bone, and does things to my digestive tract that I’d rather not mention.

You might call them garage sales or yard sales instead of tag sales, but they’re the same thing. Estate sales are another beast entirely. Someone dies and his/her heirs sell off the deceased’s lifelong accumulations. It’s sad, if you think long enough about it … so I don’t.

Sellers know the allure of estate sales, so sometimes they stoop to deceit. I once went to a purported estate sale with a friend. As we walked down a hallway, we passed a closed door that was marked “Do Not Enter.” We thought nothing of it … until a woman who was working the sale approached the door carrying a bowl of soup. She knocked on the door. The door opened a crack, just wide enough for an arm from inside the room to reach out, grab the soup bowl, and then re-close the door.

“I think that person is pretending to be dead,” my friend said. I think she was right.

But usually, estate sales are run by companies that specialize in this type of sale. The people running them are organized, strict about their no-haggling rule, and they don’t allow the heirs or the dead person on the premises while the sale is going on.

It used to be that you attended estate sales in person, but now you can find them online, posing as auctions. The bidding can get fierce at the end of the auctions. Bidders get flooded with adrenaline and pay outrageously high prices for items just so they can beat out other people. I can just imagine their buyer’s remorse the next day when they realize that they bought a piece of junk for a week’s salary. Well, in truth, I don’t have to imagine their remorse. I’ve lived it.

Sometimes, though, you can get a really good deal. I “won” a 10-foot, real leather, two-piece sectional couch for $310. Of course, that was the price before the “bidder’s premium” and taxes were added on. Then, I had to hire two guys to pick it up and bring it to my house. All in all, I paid close to $500. But, it was still a deal. Or that’s what I’m telling myself. It’s also beautiful, which helped to assuage my doubt about the purchase. I finally got to the point where I was very happy that I bought it. I told a bunch of people about it and one said, “I hope it doesn’t have bedbugs.” Oh for the love of God. Some people just have to bring other people down. I told her that we vacuumed it, and disinfected it, and polished the leather and we saw no sign of bugs. I also told her that we got the piece from a gorgeous home in a wealthy neighborhood. She shook her head and said, “Bedbugs cross all income levels.” Rather than kill her, I offered up a prayer that my sectional was bug-free. I’m sure that worked. God is the supreme protector of, among other things, second-hand furniture.

Facebook is also a good place to find online tag/garage/yard sales. Every neighborhood has at least one site where people sell their unwanted possessions. There’s also a Facebook Marketplace which aggregates the individual sale sites. I’ve bought quite a lot of really useful and necessary items from these sites. For example, I got a set of antique mahogany bed steps. The top step has a storage compartment inside it. The second step pulls out onto the bottom step and it, too, has a storage compartment for … bedpans. In the 1800s, when this one was made, people slept in really high beds, so they needed steps to get into them. The steps were kept next to their beds. The lid of the top step flipped open and people kept their spectacles and other other antiquities in the hollow compartment. The second step was used to store a person’s chamber pot. That way, if he or she had to relieve him/herself in the middle of the night, the chamber pot could be used and then shut up in the step until it could be emptied in the morning.

My husband and son were disgusted by this information about my new, 200-year-old bed steps. I assured them that any antique germs that were still lingering inside the second step could easily be obliterated with a few Clorox wipes. How strong could those germs be after two centuries? They’re probably hobbling around on walkers by this point. If I’m wrong, however, I just might become patient zero with the Bubonic Plague. I hope my friends are vaccinated.

In addition to the leather sectional and contaminated bed steps, thanks to local online auctions and Facebook sites, I am also the owner of, among other things, Windsor-like chairs, wicker dressers that needs painting, many pairs of sterling silver candlesticks, a pair of brass candlesticks with hanging crystals, wooden shoe trees, a red Chinese wedding dress, red kitchen chairs, folk-art prints, silver and gold jewelry, and a cast-iron clothes iron with an interesting history.

After some research into my antique iron, I discovered that it was called a “sad iron.” I thought that it was so-named because the person (woman) who was ironing was sad about having to do this job, but that wasn’t the case. It turns out that “sad” used to mean “solid” back in the day. Also, back in olden days, keeping an iron hot was a struggle. A woman would have to heat the iron on her stove, and then carefully remove the iron by grabbing its burning-hot metal handle. After medicating her burnt hand, she’d have to run to the ironing board and iron really fast before the iron got cold again. Then she would put the iron back on the stove and repeat the painful process. Somewhere along the way, somebody invented a wooden handle, aka a “cold handle,” that didn’t absorb as much heat as cast iron so that a person could lift the iron off the stovetop without scalding herself too much —but the real genius of the nineteenth century was a woman named Mary Florence Potts.

Mrs. Potts’s invention changed women’s lives for the better. She invented and patented a clothes iron with a detachable wooden handle. A woman would buy the handle and several metal bases that were pointed on each end (so that ironing could be done in either direction). The brilliant part was that a woman could continue ironing even after her iron got cold because all she had to do was detach the handle from the cold iron, attach the handle to a hot base that was warming on the stove, and then reheat the cold iron. Women went wild for Mrs. Potts’s iron. She was renowned for being a successful female entrepreneur, and her invention appeared at two World Fairs. I am now a proud owner of one of her irons — well, actually, a knockoff of one of her irons. I didn’t know that it was a copy until I looked up Mrs. Potts’s sad iron online. The genuine irons say “Mrs. Potts Sad Iron.” She started off selling them herself but eventually let the American Machine Company of Philadelphia do her marketing and selling. Unfortunately, mine was made by the A.C. Williams Co. of Ravenna, Ohio. Regardless, I feel honored to own a piece of history —  a copycat piece of history, but a piece, nonetheless.

While writing this, it occurred to me that what I enjoy most about these sales is the thrill of the hunt. I get exhilarated when I find a one-of-a-kind item for a great price. Sometimes, though, those unique items turn out to be less than one-of-a-kind (like the time I bought my cousin a “vintage, handmade quilt washed and hung to dry in the Texas sun” that turned out to be a used quilt from Bed Bath & Beyond), but those setbacks don’t deter me.

The only deterrent to my hobby could be my husband, but so far he’s been very accepting of my purchases — the ones he knows about, that is. So far, he hasn’t looked in the chamber-pot storage area of my bed steps. And, I doubt he ever will.