SecondMoonshot

 90% of out lawn art is estate sale picks. Kudos to Z for bringing it together.  John

Back in mid-2021 I had heard about an auction in Spring Hope, NC called One Man’s Treasure Auction Company (aka OMT) from someone I met at one of the JMS Estate Sales. Cute young lady that sold vintage cloths; can’t remember her name but her young son I do recall was Roland, 3 or 4 years old, good looking kid. She inquired on some old T-Shirt I had on and wondered if I had any more to sell her. I sent her some pics of 5 or so, of which she only ended up taking the Rick Springfield concert T-Shirt. I ended up giving it to her for free via a porch-pickup and my only ask was to give me some ideas on some different ways to source some good inventory. She mentioned Stan and OMT and said they were good folks and I should check them out. For whatever reason, I never did follow up on that lead, at least not for 6 or so months later. Zabrina and I were driving back from a visit to Rummage Warehouse in Wilson, NC (a great place in its own right and Bill and team are awesome) on a Saturday night,

Nothing is off limits for the most part, but I find myself gravitating on a consistent basis to certain things. I don’t really follow the analytics on “what sells” and “the best categories”. I stick with things that interest me and have proven to provide profit/selling history, highly unique, represent my brand or at least enjoyment in having them for a period. So here are some of my favorites - all contingent that I can get at a reasonable cost: China Sets and Singles: I am doing some “replacement” business on a limited scale, but enjoy finding good sets, in excellent condition, no chips or crazing, and a pattern that is generally classic or has some sales history to anchor to. UPDATE 1/23/23 - Now that I have a decent inventory of china replacements, the Q4 sales for 2022 were awesome and definitely seasonal. Signed and Limited Edition Prints: I will do an occasional unsigned print here and there if the subject matter and framing is nice, but generally I tend to focus on limited edit

We had a small debate as to go to an Artz estate sale or to a JMS and decided the JMS would have more item to our profile (small, Asian, pictures, books, etc). I think we made the right call and ended up some some awesome finds and a Koto Digital Rice Cooker/Steamer for ourselves (actually, quite a bit more items for ourselves, but that’s another story). John as usual drove a hard negotiation and easily resolved, albeit mostly I think in my favor, but he knows his business and knows he will get more back in future dividends - Zabrina had us swing by Foster’s and pick up some Whopper’s cookies for the JMS crew. The calligraphy set was especially nice and the 2 Stetson hats were a pleasant surprise. This should keep me posting listings well into next week and maybe some of it can translate into the 1st of the month peak I normally see. Zabrina already has 7 bells on magic carpets, so not sure how much of this sale will translate into SecondMoonshot dividends, we will see. The leather “ma

The year started off slow from a buying perspective with nearly no estate sales for the first 10 days, but was strong on the selling side - probably my second strongest month (second to September 2021 with the Stallion Boots). Over the last week, came into a visit to a warehouse an hour out of town by one of the team for JMS Estate Sales and walked away with some pretty good finds (and some not so good, but we wont worry about those…they go into the next Yard Sale pile).  Zabrina and I also went to a Steve Minor Estate Sale in Cary NC on Friday morning with some very nice and well cared items, many unique and will be listing all of these over the next week. We got in early (#3 and #4) and bought strong.  Here are some of the items we will be listing soon.  There is a lot more that cant be seen like some awesome Asian vases, Chinese granite etching, and Chinese large wall hanging scrolls (signed I think). I move from the 10’x20’ unit/warehouse/storage with Public Storage to the new 20’x

Kim and Grannie Panties sent a late email that she would be slowly unloading one of her stores contents into her parking lot for a clearance sale. Wasn’t overly advertised by since it was Kim, it was a better option then driving an hour and a half to Hickory NC for an estate sale for a lawyer. The crowd was light, very friendly and no pushing or shoving, a couple familiar faces but a good overall experience. Spend about $100 overall but got some good finds. Some of the items will end up staying in the house like this milk glass (jadite?) flour shaker which will now serve as a Cocoa Shaker in the coming months. Kim was a bit overwhelmed during the initial start and as often happens the crowd helped out where they could. We also found a few nice items which will serve as stocking stuffers for the family.  We took a break  in the middle of the sale to go over to the Scrap thrift store which has the absolute best book section (probably in the state, its closer to a library with thousands o

Steve Minor had a Thursday / Friday estate sale, so I thought I would go by a few minutes after it started. It kicked off at 8a and I came in around 8:10a due to another commitment. Turned out a little better than I though and found some items that should do well. Just picked books that looked interesting and 2 or 3 of them were signed, others were just interesting books or French cook books which do reasonably well. Poking around upstairs I found an empty box for boots, so went on the hunt to find the boots that fit and ended up finding them in excellent condition, so got a few other pairs…one antique pair and another Born Boots leather pair also in very good shape. We’ll see how they do. Relatively easy atmosphere today and crowd was generally well-behaved. So much nicer to just go right after they open and skip the chaos phase. John

On Saturday, decided to hit a JMS Sale which turned out pretty good getting some decent items and very fair prices (typical JMS)….and did a bit of low effort picking in the garage. While I was in the garage attic, I noticed a large volume of flat large heavy duty boxes and also picture boxes, probably a few hundred. Went back on Sunday to get the boxes with Zabrina and to make it worth JMS’ time, picked up a few other things along the way. We got as many boxes that we could get into our Volvo XC60, which ended up being about a 30” stack. I will use these for custom boxes, cut down into backing board for the books and other periodicals, but will be great for custom boxes of large pictures which really need the heavy duty cardboard (which I have been getting at Lowe’s for probably $3.50 each - so this should cover me for a year or two! Update: The Chalk board was listed as a “Harvard” chalk board, not sure why as it had an IKEA sticker on it, apparently from the Luns product line. Didn’t