Trash or TREASURE?
Turning ‘junk’ into a profit has seen Kevin scouring the country for hidden gems
You may have gathered by now, I love old stuff. I cannot stay away from auctions, secondhand shops, Salvation Army stores or TradeMe.
This is not to say I make any money out of it. You get a pretty good idea of how well you’ve done from trading when you downsize later in life.
All that stuff you bought thinking it would rise in value has its day of reckoning. My days of reckoning have been sobering.
I’d say 75 percent of what I bought with the idea of making a profit sold for less. In some cases, dramatically less.
It’s embarrassing, for example, how many glorious, century-old loop-backed Bentwood chairs now clutter my garage. But it seems the bottom’s fallen out of the market.
But don’t grieve for me. I’ve had occasional luck. In the 1990s, I walked away empty-handed from a garage sale on a farm and noticed a large wooden object lying in a paddock.
On closer investigation, it was an old, somewhat unattractive weather-beaten wooden horse. It had a certain appeal, so I asked if I could buy it.
Five dollars and it’s yours, they said.
A year or so later, short of a buck (as it were), I took the horse into a secondhand shop to see if they’d buy it. They said it was an old merry-go-round horse and offered me $400.
I was over the moon. We did the deal and it sat on their shelves for years.
When my pecuniary situation improved, I returned to the shop with the view to buying the old horse back.
Maybe now I could restore it. But alas, it was gone. They told me an overseas dealer had come into the shop and offered them $12,000 for it. And this was 30 years ago! It was now on a ship to the United States. Vintage carousel horses were, apparently, all the rage.
Yes, I was briefly perturbed.
But that’s the mark of a great deal. Everyone makes something out of it.
Don’t begrudge someone else doing well if you’ve done well yourself. If anyone deserved sympathy, it was the garage-sale people who gave it to me for $5.
We’ve now little room in our cottage for new, old stuff – if you know what I mean. But we still love secondhand shops.
Maybe it’s just the smell. And that’s free.
If anyone deserved sympathy, it was the garagesale people who gave it to me for $5