Two Things
A good old buying and selling update
Welcome to my occasional, when-I-feel-like-it bonus content about secondhand shopping and selling, minor fascinations, passing fancies, and old stuff! This is the same subscription as Just Some Lady and you are (obviously!) free to skip it.
I think I have called an end to my Summer DressQuest. The final contestant was a good old Old Navy T-shirt dress, which, at the time of my order, was on sale for $6. Yes, you would do well to interrogate how it is a new 100% cotton dress can be sold for $6. I am not saying I’m a great steward of the environment, here, but I am saying I will be decent and comfortably clad for working from home AND leaving the house. At least it is biodegradable?
(By the way, I’m not tall, and I didn’t like how short the regular length was, so I exchanged it for the same size in the tall length, and it falls right to my knee.)
I also bought this dress in black on a whim because, with the sale price augmented by a discount code, I paid a grand total of $5 for it. It fits, although I think the neckline might be Too Young for me. For the price, I will keep it and throw a cardigan over it should I find myself unable to get over the scoop neck.
Last month I mentioned I finally found a pair of Jordache jeans. They are jeans and will go with pretty much whatever, but I had something specific in mind, so I thrifted this red silk blouse:
This outfit still needs something (maybe, for instance, not standing in front of my horrible closet and behind my attention-seeking dog), but for $9 I am calling the blouse good.
My online selling has slowed to a crawl. I haven’t sold anything this month, but I also haven’t been putting much effort behind it. I had the most success when I listed (or re-listed) something daily and shared all of my listings daily. I’m down to the last dozen or so listings, and they’re obviously not doorbusters; I still re-share them pretty frequently, but there’s only so many ways to describe a Lands End t-shirt.
It’s fortunate I had a lot of things to sell whilst not working full-time. As both a distraction and as a way to make some spare cash (which…in full transparency was mostly reinvested in secondhand stuff), it was a good use of my time.
I only ever bought one thing at a thrift store to “flip”; it is still for sale. Which actually goes to show that you can stand there with your little Google image search window open and find many similar items that sold for a reasonable price, but the market wants what it wants, and if they don’t want your Adriano Goldschmied jeans, well, they might as well still be hanging on the rack at Goodwill. Lesson learned!
Clothes aside, I’ve branched out and listed a few of my old toys on eBay. These are things my nieces and nephews have already outgrown or wouldn’t want, and while I’ve really gone back and forth over this recently, I think this has to include my collection of holiday Barbies circa 1990-1998. They aren’t worth a lot, but I can’t see just letting them take up space in my spare room closet only for someone to have to deal with them when I die. I’d rather some stranger acquire them intentionally (and then someone else deal with them when they die).
In reality, a lot of things will likely end up on the neighborhood Buy Nothing group; thus far, treasures like my Genie-from-Aladdin music box have not proved tempting to the collectors of eBay. I am not even sure why I have this music box, to be honest with you. In high school, my theater dork friends and I loved all the songs from the animated Disney movie, but there is no reason I should have a porcelain music box that plinks out the one song from the movie I had a hard time remembering. Perhaps some neighborhood child is obsessed with this now 34-year-old movie and would simply love hearing the tinniest possible version of this song on endless repeat? We shall see.
I love that red blouse and it looks great with the jeans.