Garage Saling - JACKPOT DAY!!!

One of my favorite things to do is go to Garage Sales. It started when I was a little girl, my Dad would get up before dawn on Saturday, run down to the gas station and get a paper, come back home and mark us out a route on a laminated map expressly for this purpose, and then wake us up earlier than we ever got up otherwise and we'd head out. We found so many fun things like a My Little Pony collection and a vast assortment of pierced earrings for pennies that I put on my doll so I could live vicariously through her since I wasn't allowed to get my ears pierced until I was 13. My Dad was so good at bargaining and he hunted down every last sale until mid-morning when we would head back home. That was how he was in all of life, did everything to the best of his abilities and spent the majority of his home-time cooking up fun things for us kids. So Garage Saling makes me nastalgic for my childhood anyway. But my find below almost made me cry in one couple's garage.

Every week for years as a child I would make a batch of Peanut Butter Playdo that we would eat for a treat after we cleaned our church (we were the janitors). There was a specific Tupperware container that worked to make it in and I have often regretted not taking that Tupperware container when my Dad was getting ready to move out of the house I grew up in after my Mom died. He asked me to take the things I wanted, but being a young and dumb college student, Tupperware was at the bottom of the list of things I was interested in. Today I walked into one elderly couple's garage and there it was...for $1...just like the one I used to make PBP in. I just looked at it and wanted to hug that lady. Instead, I bought 23 other pieces of Tupperware from her. "Honey, do you have somewhere to PUT all this?" she asked. "Yep, I've got a big cabinet with just a couple pieces in it waiting until I came across something like this," I replied. Here are the rest of my garage sale finds:

I had checked Craigslist and the online Clarion Ledger (a lesson in disastrous web-architecture) and found 22 sales in a one-mile area. I was a woman on a mission and made it to every last one of them in my 2-hour window. I paid a grand total of $27, a STEAL of a deal!

1 Car Seat for Thomas' truck - $2

10 kids books (including an almost-new Cars and Trucks and Things That Go to replace our 25-year-old copy that is in pieces with several pages laying on my kitchen counter to be taped back in. - $2.50

1 Under-Bed rolling storage container - $2

1 Set of measuring cups (I often run out when baking b/c I don't plan my wet/dry measuring well) - 15 cents

1 Set of measuring spoons (same deal as the cups) - 10 cents

1 Strainer - 10 cents

1 vintage Fisher-Price train set. I have an identical set from my childhood but all the cars are broken now - $1

And 27 pieces of Tupperware for $19! I've been biding my time for 6 years of marriage with the few pieces I had, looking for a good deal, but no one ever sells the stuff! I even told Thomas I wanted money for Mother's Day so I could buy some when I found a good deal. I was almost ready to give up and get some cheap Walmart knock-offs because I often run out of containers between the freezer, fridge, and dishwasher. And here, an older couple was combining 2 houses and she didn't have room for all her Tupperware. "You'd think she was a dealer" said her husband :). I bought half of what she had, shaking with glee as I carried my prizes out to the van. What a blessing! I am so excited to have great-quality kid-freezer-dishwasher-fridge friendly containers in every shape and size imagineable! The 13x9 container alone retails for $28 so I would say that less than $1 apiece for this stash is a GREAT DEAL!! Thank you Lord!