I've been planning for a little while to take my oldest son's gf to lunch today for her birthday. I've been looking forward to having a girls day out with her, and today was finally the day. Since she lives about 40 minutes away, I decided to see if there were any estate sales in that area...kind of the icing on the day, so to speak.
I found one sale that looked really promising. It was listed by a company called Wonder Women Estate Sales, and it ended up being only 1 mile from my son's condo. The sale originally was supposed to start Thursday evening, but we got a ton of snow dumped on us last Wednesday, so the sale was postponed.
By the time they were able to plow the driveway and make room for shoppers, they decided to start the sale on Saturday morning. Numbers were going to be available starting at 12:30 on Friday. I convinced my son that he would LOVE to drive "just down the street" to sign my name on the list so I could get a good number when I noticed on their website that they have ONLINE sign up sheets!!! YAYYYY!!!
I didn't even have to leave home to get a number!!! There was a little glitch and it wasn't active at 12:30, but by 1:00 it was active and byy 1:02 I was #14 for the house and Mr was #12 for the barn. Simple as that!!! The instructions said we should be there at 8:50 to get lined up and ready to go in at 9:00. How sweet is that!?!?!
They emailed a list of names and numbers and everyone was super fine with it! Although there were about 20 people lined up ahead of me, I still got to go in at #14, and as far as I could tell, there weren't any complainers.
As they were opening the doors this morning, a woman (I'm assuming she was the company owner) announced to us that her company was the only company in Michigan to use this numbering system and that her husband wrote the software for it! I bet he makes some serious money off of his program!!!
I absolutely LOVED not having to get there an hour early just to sit and wait. Time is important, and I hate waiting outside of sales for them to open. If every estate sale company in Michigan did this number system, I think I'd get to more sales! What do you think about this? Have you ever been to a sale that did something like this? How did it go for you??
The only bad thing...while I was waiting in line to get in, one man told everyone that we had better not have parked on the road in front of the house because it was against the community ordinance to park on the road, and if the police came, it was an automatic $75 ticket!!!
Guess who parked on the road...me and about 20 other people!!! I forgot my phone in the car, so I had no way to contact Mr, to tell him to hurry up-so we wouldn't get a ticket, and he had the keys!! I raced through the house and picked up a couple things, but couldn't relax enough to really shop with the memories of the parking ticket I got a few years back in Ann Arbor rolling through my head. That parking ticket was only $20 but still, it took all the fun out of the finds that day. I didn't want a repeat-especially at the much higher price!!
I found him in the basement/garage and we bolted to the car. Whew!! No police around and not ticket!!! We left and went to a few other shops in a nearby strip mall before heading back to our son's condo. We waited about an hour for me to leave to meet our girl for lunch and for the guys to catch a movie. When we drove by the sale there were a ton more cars parked on the road-both sides this time, and still no police and no tickets. I'm glad. It wasn't a super busy road, but busy enough. The cars were able to be off on the shoulder even with the snow, so no one was blocking traffic.
Now I wish I would have taken longer to look around!!! We were in and out and driving away in 15 minutes! I got two of the things I saw in the pictures online, and I saw the other things I was interested in-one was an 11" (or #7) cobalt Fiesta mixing bowl-but it was $395.00---not even close to my ballpark! Mr got a couple of old rusty tools for $1 each. We both were happy, we had a junkin fix and it was part of the adventure!
Here is what I picked up today...
We also stopped at Home Goods, TJ Maxx, Kirkland and Mr's favorite coin shop. These are the other things I picked up at Home Goods:
Fiesta brand Tablecloth!
A couple of really big platters that I couldn't leave behind!
Oh, by the way...Lunch was fun, and I finally got to meet her mom! Mr got taken to a movie where the seats recline and a server brings you lunch while you watch the move, and free popcorn! Now we're just getting ready to head out to play some volleyball-what a great day today has been, and we've had blue skies and sunshine ALL day!!!
Happy Weekend!!!
Online numbers...how sweet is that! I've always liked Wonder Women sales a lot -- the ladies who run them are so nice and really organized. Online numbering makes them even better.
ReplyDeleteGreat finds -- love the tablecloths. I'm glad you got a couple, because you really needed them.
Great finds! The tablecloths are fabulous, so vivid! :)
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