Tag: frugality

Too many books / The great re-organization pt.1

garbagefinds11 Comments

Sorry for the long wait. It was a busy year, and after yard sale season ended I became laser-focused on organizing my various spaces.

I might remember 2023 as the “Year of the Book Hauls.” Not just the wackos who tossed a recycling bin (or two) of often antique books almost every week for several months, but also a few other fairly large book hauls, including one at that spot I literally pulled an all-nighter digging through (another memorable experience that I’ll have to expand upon at some point).

I’m happy I saved the books, and have already earned somewhere between a few and several thousand dollars selling the books, but my biggest regret this year was also how I dealt with them. A lot – we’re talking several hundred – ended up in the “yard sale bins,” but it turns out that books really don’t do well at yard sales. Sure, some people will buy some classics, but most just sat collecting dust, while I (and the friends I hire to help at my sales) got plenty of exercise trotting these heavy boxes in and out of my storage spaces. It was not dissimilar to how Sisyphus got a great workout pushing that rock up that hill over and over again.

Also a point of irritation: the space I wasted at yard sales displaying books that rarely sold, when I could have put literally anything else in the same place with better results. I think I would have made about as much money selling vintage underwear than I did selling these books… and the vintage underwear would have weighed a lot less. There were bins that barely made it to sales until the end of the year, because they (the forests) got forgotten for all the books (trees) in the way. The yard sale book strategy was simply not an effective use of space or time.

Anyways, by the end of yard sale season, I was sick of the books. Thankfully my mom and sister were willing to help me sort them. The picture above is the conclusion of a few hours of work, where we assembled 23 boxes of old/antique books – about 360 total – for a bulk sale.

Here’s a couple of the 23 boxes, just as an example. We weeded out newer books, and kept some classics that we thought had a better chance of selling at my sales (even that might have been a mistake, but oh well). Mercifully, someone off Facebook Marketplace came pretty quickly and bought them all for 400$.

Otherwise, about a month earlier I sold five boxes of incomplete sets for 100$ (the prodigious book tossers owned two complete sets of the “Source Records of the Great War”, and two incomplete sets… incredible).

Before that, I sold two boxes of Franklin Library (a company that publishes nice, leather-bound editions of classic works) books for somewhere around 300$.

So, the profit was there (this doesn’t even include the books I sold on eBay, including one that went for 700$). The only issue is that it took me almost a full yard sale season to realize that these “yard sale” books were boat anchors, and that the best way to deal with them was to unload them in bulk. Looking back, I shake my head thinking about how much effort I put into hauling these books around.

“Live and learn” is an apt expression here.

I should also include a quick mention of all the books I ended up curbing or donating. Above is just the purge pile from the day my mom and sister helped – there were many more I decided weren’t worth the effort on different days. If curbed, I always left them in places where I knew lots of people would walk past and pick through them. For donation, I left most in various book exchange boxes, the kind that you see often walking around this city.

There’s still about 300 books in my garage, but at least those are cool ones that need to be listed on eBay, or that I’ve decided I need to research further.

After all that, I was in a mood for a reset. I wanted to get my spaces in order, ideally in a way that would promote superior order going forward. Thankfully, the fall weather held up pretty nicely, affording me lots of time to organize my various spots in relative comfort. First came the Coloniale space, and the many bins of yard sale junk (some of which I hadn’t been good at keeping organized, because of the books). This bin, for example, was just a huge mound of papers that people rarely saw. Most of them were cool, but you can only have so much 1960s-1980s travel ephemera (for example). I left about half of it on the curb for other pickers to dig through.

By the end, everything was in its place. Coloniale is for yard sale stuff, and occasionally overflow. So the junk was purged, the random things that fell by the wayside (and sometimes got moldy) tossed, the hallway raked, and the things that were too fancy, or simply warranted further research were brought to the garage, aka “The Office.”

And I’ll leave it at that for now. Hopefully it doesn’t take me another three months to get to part two.

Links

1. My eBay listings. Sign up for eBay (Canada, US). Search for something you want / research something you have (Canada, US). — These are Ebay Partner Network links. If you create an account or buy something after getting to eBay from here, I get a small cut of the profit!  —
2. “Things I find in the garbage” on Facebook
3. Follow @garbagefinds and @garbagefindssells. Note that someone else runs the latter.
4. Email: thingsifindinthegarbage@gmail.com. Note that I really suck at keeping up with my email.
5. Donate to the blog. It costs close to 500$ a year to maintain (no ads, domain name, storage space, etc) which ain’t cheap. Otherwise, it’s nice to get a few bucks for coffee, food, or gas!

The all-nighter

garbagefinds15 Comments

Things are picking up again. Tuesday nights have been really productive the past two weeks, and Wednesdays have provided some smaller but notable hauls as well. The other days have been hit and miss, though Thursday/Friday came through last night when I came across a massive pile of trash behind an apartment building and spent eight hours looking through it. I think that’s a record for me – I got there at 10:30 at night and left as the sun rose around 6:30 in the morning, with only a Timmie’s tea and muffin break in between to give me the strength to keep going. Someone dumped what looked like much of an apartment, and obviously didn’t put much care into the process. Anyways, I made a few notable scores (and still have a lot in the van to sort through), but that’ll have to wait for another post.

I finally got Covid a few weeks ago. It wasn’t too bad, but still slowed me down for nearly a week. I went on a few garbage runs during, later at night so I wouldn’t see anyone and with a mask on, so I was able to hit up my usual spots and make a few finds.

Otherwise, the university students (particularly the McGill kids) are back in town, so I plan on doing a couple yard sales this weekend hoping to sell them stuff for their new apartments. I should be out at 4100 Coloniale from 12-7 both days if anyone is interested!

Anyways, here’s some more of my Park Ex finds from earlier this year. One of my favourite finds was stored in a dingy ziplock bag, which maybe led to the tossers not noticing it.

It’s a cute 10k gold alarm clock pendant. This thing is smaller than a dime, but it’s fairly thick and hefty, and at nearly 5 grams it’s worth roughly 175$ CAD just for scrap.

These folks owned some cool leather stuff, and were definitely into guns. At one point they threw out a bunch of old bullets and shotgun shells, which seems like a dumb thing to do. There’s a few holsters here, and a couple of ammo holders. The holder on the bottom looks pretty old. I think the leather pieces on the left are used somehow in shaving, maybe someone can explain how they work in the comments.

Another batch of quality junk. That clock on the bottom left is kind of cool and unusual. The sterling comb is obviously busted, but at least the silver is worth 10$ or so. A lot of this stuff will probably end up on my Instagram selling page.

I liked this old clipboard, which was patented in 1893. I’m tempted to keep this, but I never actually use clipboards so I probably shouldn’t.

More quality junk. I love the embroidered “darning bag.” Below is a Mexican silver chain, and a silver cigarette holder that was made in Israel (with an end piece that doesn’t quite match).

This Aiwa Walkman feels like an outlier here. I’m pretty good at identifying the more collectible models at this point, and I was able to sell this for 135$ on eBay even though it doesn’t work. It’s a pretty compact model, which tend to be well-made and less common (and thus more valuable). Walkman values have climbed a lot in the last five years or so.

Finally, we have a couple big silverplate candlesticks, a couple little depression glass (I think) pieces, an a kitschy Charlton glass bottle with stopper. Stuff for Instagram or maybe the yard sale.

I had a couple of great weeks at this spot, but unfortunately I’d bet that I missed out on some great stuff before I found it. Oh well, so it goes. Anyways, hope to see you at a yard sale this weekend!

Links

1. My eBay listings. Sign up for eBay (Canada, US). Search for something you want / research something you have (Canada, US). — These are Ebay Partner Network links. If you create an account or buy something after getting to eBay from here, I get a small cut of the profit!  —
2. “Things I find in the garbage” on Facebook
3. Follow @garbagefinds and @garbagefindssells. Note that someone else runs the latter.
4. Email: thingsifindinthegarbage@gmail.com. Note that I really suck at keeping up with my email.
5. Donate to the blog. It costs close to 500$ a year to maintain (no ads, domain name, storage space, etc) which ain’t cheap. Otherwise, it’s nice to get a few bucks for coffee, food, or gas!

Week of the iPods pt.2

garbagefinds27 Comments

Later that week I happened upon a small pile in Outremont which contained a bit of older tech stuff. I saved several PS2 controllers, an old Apple Airport Extreme, an Apple keyboard and four iPods.

The four iPods brought my total for the week to eight, which is definitely my all-time record. While I think the first ones were thrown out because of a move, I’m not really sure why these were tossed. Maybe Marie Kondo had something to do with it! As for value, these 4th & 5th generation iPod Classics still have some value despite being over a decade old. They all have 60gb of storage, a relatively high capacity, and should sell for between 40-60$ each.

That spot also provided a bunch of sports games for PS3 & XBox 360, a few of which were never even opened. Sports games depreciate a lot quicker than other games, but this collection still netted about 30$ after fees at the auction house. Easy money!

That week was also good for jewellery boxes. The first came from this pile in Nouveau Bordeaux.

It was a nice box in its own right, a Japanese import probably from the 60s. Inside was a music box and a magnetic ballerina that would rotate on the glass. It sold for 20-some dollars at auction.

The contents were clearly pillaged, but there were still a few bits left for me.

Most of my profit came from the three broken bits of 14k gold in the middle, which if I remember right earned me about 80$ (I recently did a scrap gold run). Otherwise, I saved a religious medallion, a miniature Cretan dagger that’s probably a hairpin, a pair of Japanese earrings, and a key fob from Thursday’s restaurant on Crescent.

Better yet was this busted box I found the next day in a richer part of town. The contents were much less picked through, and I salvaged a few great items.

There’s two gold pieces here, including a 10k gold and pearl ring by Birks and a 14k cameo brooch. To the left of that is a nice turquoise brooch – it looks like this one purportedly made by the Zuni of the southwestern United States. It’s probably unmarked silver, and I’d bet that the donkey pendant is unmarked silver as well. I think the pocket watch is 800 or 925 (sterling) silver, though I haven’t yet figured out its hallmarks.

Here’s some closeups of the finer pieces. Overall, they should earn me several hundred dollars. This was definitely one of my best jewelry hauls in some time, but hopefully there’s more coming in the near future!

Otherwise, I brought my first big collection of e-waste to the recycling box recently. I lost track of how much e-waste I salvaged last year, but this year I should be less busy and more able to keep a running tally. In this picture is 4.68kg of electronics, most of which were broken, missing pieces, or not worth selling. I also recycled about 1.1kg of batteries, with most of that weight coming a MacBook Pro battery.

I’m curious to see how much I can recycle over a full year! I can only do so much, so I prefer to focus on cell phones and other small electronics. Laptops too, when they turn up.

That one week was pretty good, but I haven’t had nearly as much luck recently. I did make a good sale though, which I’ll tell you about in an upcoming post.

I don’t know about you, but I’m pretty much done with winter at this point. Here’s hoping the warmer weather is coming soon! Garbage picking is a lot more fun in the spring and summer.

Links

1. Facebook page
2. My eBay listings, Sign up for eBay, Search for something you want / research something you have (I’m a member of the eBay Partner Network so I make a bit of money if you buy things [even if they’re not mine] or sign up for an account via these links)
3. Help me pay off student loan debt / Contribute to the blog
4. Follow me on Instagram