One Man's Trash: Power Garage Saling

My parents were in last weekend. They live in Michigan, and Dad volunteered to come here and stain our deck. It hadn't been stained since... oh, the last time he offered to come and stain it. Since then, it's dealt with several blazing hot summers and a golf ball-sized hailstorm, so it was in need of a little TLC.

Here's something you should know about my mom: Since she's retired, she's become a crack garage saler. I mean crack. She and her best friend Gloria head out early on Thursday (the day most sales start, and the best day to scope out the good stuff) and don't return until late afternoon, often with whatever minivan they took out laden with unbelievable bargains. At the beginning of the season Mom will ask what we need, and next time I see her, she'll have it. My coffee carafe is stained and melted on one side? She's got a new one she found for $1. I think it would be cool to have a pedestal cake stand? She's got an unused one from Williams Sonoma for which she paid 50 cents. The boys and Sylvia are at least 50% clothed in garage sale finds: Ralph Lauren, Nordstrom, Baby Gap...

I don't garage sale as much as I'd like, but I love to go out when I can. And over the years I've picked up a few bargains: Unused black Doc Martens for $3.50. Shelby Foote's History of the Civil War for $2 per book. Vintage turquoise canisters that matched my (at the time) vintage turquoise kitchen. And the little wooden chairs for Sylvie that are still awaiting my gaining some painting prowess. So with Mom here on Saturday, I twisted her arm and begged her to head out with me, Tommy, and Sylvia. As you can imagine, with an infant and a toddler in tow, we didn't hit as many sales as she and Gloria typically do, but the kids were golden, and in about five sales, and spending about $32 between us, we picked up some gems.

The biggest coup, from my standpoint, was at the last sale. I'm slowly making Sylvia this hand-quilted wall hanging (from Last-Minute Quilted + Patchwork Gifts) to go over her crib:

I'd decided to get her a red gingham crib skirt to go with it, and found what I wanted at Pottery Barn Kids. But it was a bit rich for my blood -- $59 -- so I figured I'd make her one instead for about $12 or $15. I've been watching for sales on gingham, and I'd even purchased the Pottery Barn Kids matching lamp shade when it was on clearance. And guess what I found at the last garage sale? (I'm sure you're all on pins and needles.) Yep, the red gingham Pottery Barn Kids crib skirt. For $3. I also picked up a great Tommy Hilfiger bed skirt for when Sylvie is in a real bed, as it matched the twin-sized quilt I've envisioned making for her.

We passed up several bargains, including a hand-stitched vintage quilt for $25, vintage McCoy vases for $15, and a serving for eight including bakeware of Pfalzgraf pottery for $15.

Here's what we bought:

• $7 A kids bike Mom is keeping for when the grandkids visit
• $1.50 Three pieces of little boys' clothes, including like-new Levi's
• $3 Crib skirt
• $3 Bed skirt
• $1 Four painted ceramic drawer pulls that will work with Sylvie's new dresser
• $5 Handcrafted wooden box with forged iron handle made by a blacksmith in Door County, Wisconsin*
• $3 Leather Coach purse (I just learned the style is "Station Bag"; who knew?)
• $.15 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory card game that Tommy spotted
• $1 Old Ptery (from Pee-Wee's Playhouse) wind-up toy
• $1 Old-fashioned kaleidoscope that Mom bought Tommy
• $2 Plastic dart board, in the box, that Mom bought Max
• Free Vintage Santa candle that Tommy spotted and the homeowner threw in for free

* Note that I was on the fence about the handcrafted box, but when Tommy started doing the pee-pee dance and the homeowner immediately came over and offered up her bathroom, I bought the box.

As a testament to Mom's hard-driving bargain style, when Tommy, who loves the 20-year-old series Pee-Wee's Playhouse, saw the Ptery wind-up toy, I immediately snatched it up, knowing we wouldn't be seeing another any time soon. Mom saw the price and clucked her tongue, noting, "They're asking a dollar for it!" I forked over the dollar, without even trying to bargain, feeling a bit indulgent.

At this point, it looks like I'll be spending the weekend painting Sylvie's room a cream color, as the apple-green-with-purple-trim Phil painted the room six years ago isn't going to go with her new gingham digs. I'm a little sad to be spending all day Saturday in her room, though, because who knows what kind of bargains might be awaiting me?

Hunkering Down, with Recipe

Really. This Indiana monsoon weather can stop any time. Any time. After a huge storm completely flooded out many Indiana residents last weekend, including these poor folks in Franklin, Mother Nature whipped up something awful again Monday night.

I was at work when the sky went black and rain and heavy winds blasted out of nowhere. I contemplated picking the kids up early, but learned that the nastiness had already ripped through the part of town where they're in daycare, so waited out the storm and left at the usual time. On the way to pick them up, it was clear this was no normal Indiana rainstorm. Tree limbs were everywhere, and a tree had fallen on one of the apartment buildings behind their daycare center.

Driving the kids home, I noticed block after block out of power. Most traffic lights were down, and all of us rush-hour drivers had to relearn the art of taking turns at each intersection. I picked up McDonald's for the kids (so sue me), not knowing whether we'd have power, or even a house, when we got home. Two blocks from our house a huge tree, complete with its root system, had just toppled down, miraculously missing the house on the same lot. It looked like the hand of God had reached down and flicked it right over. Across the street from our house, a big tree had cracked in half and lay in the road.

Our house was powerless, but intact. The boys ate their happy meals; I fed Sylvia. Phil gathered up no-power supplies like flashlights and candles, and then drove my freezer supply of breastmilk to a friend's house who hadn't lost power. (This is the curse of breastfeeding; the first thing you think in any crisis is "What about the breastmilk???!!!")

As night fell, the realization of a TV-less night started dawning on Tommy and Max. I explained to Tommy that we didn't have any power, and he would say, "Well, then go get more power." Like I could pick it up at Target, along with some diapers. So I suggested we learned about a family who lived before TVs even existed, and pulled out my second-grade copy of Little House in the Big Woods. I love this book. I've probably read it five times as an adult.

We started reading about Laura and Mary and Pa and Ma preparing for a long winter: butchering, salting, smoking, braiding, harvesting. A few pages into it, Max was riveted. He would say things like, "Don't read any more! I have to go to the bathroom!" Then he'd come back and we'd continue on. The next morning, the house still powerless, he woke me up early to see if we could read more. We sat together and ate generic Mini-Wheats without milk and read, just like our forebears.

Today the electricity's back on, so in honor of campfire cooking, I made ranch beans in the slow cooker. These are protein-packed, relatively inexpensive, pretty yummy, and largely made from ingredients you likely have on hand.

Slow-Cooker Ranch Beans

1 pound ground hamburger
1/2 cup chopped onion
2 15-oz. cans baked beans
1 15-oz. can pinto beans, rinsed and drained
1/4 cup brown sugar
1 tsp. salt
1/2 tsp. Worchestire sauce
1/4 cup catsup
1 Tbsp. prepared mustard

Brown the hamburger with the onion. Add this, as well as the rest of the ingredients, to a slow cooker, and cook on a low setting 8 to 10 hours. Enjoy after a long day hunting.

Poll: What to Do with a Windfall

Over Memorial Day weekend I was at my parents' house in Michigan for my niece's high school graduation. My parents still live in the house I grew up in: a little 1100-square foot 1950s ranch that back in the day had only one bathroom for the five of us to fight over. The house sits in a cute subdivision in which all of the streets carry nautical names: Embarcadero, Aquarina, Levee... It also has a subdivision beach sitting on a man-made lake. When I was a child, we lived at the beach every summer, and it's still an active, fun place for kids. This weekend included a Memorial Day parade; a "holiday egg hunt" that was actually a delayed Easter egg hunt, as Easter was too cold this year to have kids outside hunting up eggs; and various beach fun. During the egg hunt, I was approached to buy a raffle ticket for $1; I had a few bucks in my back pocket in case the kids wanted something from the concession stand -- known as the Wienie Shack when I was growing up. So I bought a ticket and forgot to ask what was being raffled.


That afternoon I got a call at my parents' house saying I'd won the raffle, which turned out to be half the money the raffle had taken in. Seeing as they'd sold $125 of tickets, I won a jackpot of $62.50. Phil suggested that this was about enough gas money to get us home -- actually, it was just under the $62.62 it took to fill our van for the return trip. But I reminded him that this little windfall was mine, and that I'd put the $1 I spent back into our joint money, but that left me with $61.50 all to myself. I've been ruminating for a week now on how to spend it. Here's what I've come up with:


The indulgent purchase. This likely would be a baby pouch from Wallababy that I covet but don't really need. One of the women in a breastfeeding support group I attended while on leave owns Wallababy, and the slings are adorable and handy. We have a Snugli, which is also handy if a little more cumbersome, so I don't really need the sling. But the $45 pouch price is now well within my extra cash.


The super-indulgent purchase. This would be something that I absolutely don't need, and that doesn't serve any real purpose except to make me happy. Like, say, a few bottles of wonderful wine to share with friends, or a little splurge at my favorite online window-shopping site, ReproDepot.com, where I can pick up fun fabric like Lil' Cowpokes to make a cute quilt for Sylvia:



Saving toward a big purchase. Back when we were moving to a Brooklyn apartment, we purchased a vintage Heywood Wakefield table and chairs, which served us well when our single friends were gathered around, eating sushi and drinking sake. Since we've started having kids, however, the table, which only comfortably seats four, has started feeling teetery and a little too delicate for our growing-family, heavy-use needs. I've been dreaming of a big, solid, distressed farm table with supports on all four corners and enough room to spread out crafts or serve a big potluck meal. So the $61.50 could be the seed money for a solid replacement table, which even after selling our Heywood Wakefield set, could cost several hundred dollars.


Investing. This is why I'm an amateur tightwad: Even though $61.50 could go far in the next several years if invested in stock or in one of the kids' 529s, I haven't gotten too excited about this option. But it's an option. And a good one. Probably the right one.



So a poll, which you might have noticed at the top of the page: If you came into a little windfall, how would you spend it? I'll leave this poll up until my birthday at the end of the month, at which time I'll take your advice to heart and see where my riches should go.

Yes, You Really Can Bake Bread

I learned about the relatively new baking book, Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day, from one of my favorite blogs, Angry Chicken. The title of the book isn't misleading: Once you mix up a big batch of dough, baking a loaf of wonderful bread takes literally less than five minutes of hands-on time.

Here's the concept: You make enough dough for about three or four round loaves of bread. The dough is wetter than dough I've made in the past, and it doesn't require kneading -- just combining a few ingredients (water, salt, flour, yeast, plus some extras based on the recipe). Making the dough takes me less than 10 minutes using a stand mixer. It would likely take a bit longer by hand, but not inordinately so. This makes a lot of dough. I store mine, covered with plastic wrap, in a big yellow Pyrex bowl that my mom received as a wedding gift in 1955.

Then, after the dough has chilled a bit, you just pull off a hunk, spend about 15 seconds forming it into a ball, slash the top, and let it rise for 20 or 40 minutes, depending on the bread. Then bake it. The hunk of dough can stay in the fridge for two weeks, and my experience is that it just gets better tasting the longer it sits. The recipes say that the batch will make four loaves, but I find three is more accurate for my baking.

Since I got the book a month or so ago (using an Amazon gift certificate, so no money was spent), I've made a white batch and a wheat batch of bread. Both were fantastic. I made one loaf of the white dough into an olive loaf using a half-empty jar of black olives that were shoved in the back of the fridge. The wheat bran bread was especially good -- great toasted and spread with PB. The loaves aren't completely like one you would get in a little French bistro, but they're better than any other homemade bread I've made, and they resemble and largely taste like the $4 loaves at a local sandwich shop.

The book has been a bestseller, so most libraries will stock it. Once you read the intro and understand the technique, the basic recipe is easy to memorize. Unless you're looking to make lots of variations, like sweet rolls, you wouldn't need to buy the book after spending a little time with a library copy. I'm not sorry to own it, and some day will try some of the more involved recipes, but for now am happy to be able to make bread cheaply and quickly that tastes fantastic. If you're interested in learning more, the authors keep up a nice website at http://www.artisanbreadinfive.com/.

Following my first week back to work -- and it was a doozy, with computer problems, major work projects, and a nasty bout of food poisoning -- we're off to see my family in Michigan for my niece's high school graduation. Where does the time go? Seems she was just a toddler. Have a fantastic, long holiday weekend!

Breaking the Price = Quality Assumption

I've continued to be intrigued by a short article I read a month ago in Newsweek; the article told of two studies involving wine tastings. The first, conducted by writer Robin Goldstein, involved blind tastings of more than 500 wines by 500 tasters ranging from novices to wine experts. The wines ranged in price from $1.50 to $150. Wines were encased in brown paper bags so that the tasters didn't see labels; they simply rated the wines on merit, not perception. The result? Cheap wines often outperformed their $50 counterparts.

A similar study in January had tasters rating wines in which they were given both true and false prices for the wines (in other words, a $50 wine was told to be $5). The result? Testers almost always preferred what they thought to be a higher-priced wine.

Purely in the name of research, I recently revisited "Two-Buck Chuck," or Charles Shaw wine available only at Trader Joe's. This wine has gotten a lot of buzz since it was introduced several years ago, and I often see people buying cases of the bargain vino. This product began as a $1.99 bottle on the West coast, but here in Indiana, it's $2.99, so technically "Three-Buck Chuck." I'd tried, I believe, a Merlot years ago and thought it was horrid. Armed with the knowledge that I might have dismissed the wine simply based on its price, I recently tried a Shiraz. And, you know, I liked it.

I then remember reading an anecdote in a magazine, although I have no idea where I read it. Likely, it was one of the pieces of wisdom I gleaned from Glamour magazine back in high school. But here's the story: A woman with a flagging jewelry business found that no one was buying her pieces. So she asked her assistant to reduce the prices by 50 percent. The assistant instead accidentally doubled the price. The result? The pieces sold out. Consumers felt that the higher-priced items were more valuable.

I found myself doing this same thing last week when out with a friend, who also has a newborn. We stopped at Baby Gap, and I was contemplating a clearance-priced cotton sweater for Sylvia. I scraped back the "$6.99" clearance sticker to see the item's original price. If it was $29, I'd feel like I was really getting a bargain, and feel more compelled to snatch it up. If it was $19, I'd feel less so. The original price, however, didn't change anything about the sweater: cotton, striped, cardigan-style. Either it was worth $6.99 to me or it wasn't. The original value placed on it by executives at The Gap shouldn't affect that value.

In watching our budget, this is one area I find where I need to be extra diligent: Purchasing items based on their value to me, not assuming that higher prices mean better quality or more desirability.

The first wine study, by the way, resulted in a book called The Wine Trials: 100 wines under $15 that beat $50 to $150 wines in brown-bag blind tastings. The book, which published earlier this month, might be worth reading, but Amazon is currently sold out. I suppose everyone's looking to be more diligent about disassociating price from perception!

The Agony of Defeat: Book Diet Over

A rather embarrassingly short time ago I mentioned that I'd been on a Book Diet: No more purchasing new books until I worked through some of my backlog. Oh, the life of an addict. Today, I'm sad to say, I broke the diet, so the ticker at the side of the screen has been reset to zero. But hear me out.

Max attends a magnet Montessori school here in town, and like most public (and private) schools, they have year-round fundraisers to subsidize their budget. A few weeks ago I packed up a couple big bags of books to donate to the annual book sale. The sale was yesterday and today, and I stopped in to look. Just to look. But with 25-cent books, I had no chance of making it out of their book-free.

In the end, I splurged and spent 75 cents: Cokie Roberts' Founding Mothers for me, a book about Mount Everest for Max, and a Max and Ruby book for Tommy. My book was a hardcover, lovingly inscribed for Mothers Day 2004 "with all our love and admiration." I felt the book needed to be rescued. Really. A Mother's Day gift discarded to the community room at an elementary school?

Meanwhile, on the way guiltily back from Max's school, I spotted a huge yard sale and scored two all-wood classic-style kids' chairs for Sylvia. Ever since I saw the magnificent but out-of-my-budget table and chairs sets at Lilipad Studio, I've been dreaming of finding a second-hand set and painting them myself. I'm especially drawn to this butterfly set:

Now I just need to acquire a wooden table and some painting talent.

It's my last day of maternity leave (are the tears smearing the type as you read this?), so I'm going to get off the computer and enjoy my last day dedicated to Sylvia. She's sleeping quietly, but I'm thinking I might need to wake her up and make her entertain me for a while.

Quick Craft: Microwaveable Heating Pads

If you're likely to receive a gift from me in the coming year, you might want to stop reading now. This is going to be my new go-to gift, and I'd hate to ruin any surprise.

Last week I caught a few minutes of Martha, just in time for Ms. Stewart to show us all a "good thing" of making homemade heating pads. The video clip and instructions are here. The heating pads are basically just long pillows filled with, in Martha's case, dried cherry pits (available through an orchard) or buckwheat hulls. You can then microwave the pillows and wrap them around whatever body part is ailing you.

The craft is incredibly easy, taking about 15 minutes start to finish, and the dimensions of the piece of fabric you cut to make the pad are just a couple inches shorter and skinnier than a fat quarter (a fat quarter being 18 inches by 22 inches). I still had a short stack of fat quarters from the Anna Maria Horner Chocolate Lollipop sampler I'd bought and made pillows from, so thought I'd try this, but I wasn't keen on ordering and paying for shipping on dried cherry pits or buckwheat hulls. Then I remembered reading or hearing somewhere that you can make little microwaveable heating pads filled with rice. I had a jar of sushi rice that had been in my pantry for, I don't know, a year waiting for me to be inspired to learn to make maki. Hadn't happened yet, and likely wouldn't. So I made a heating pad with the fabric, the sushi rice, and because I didn't have quite enough sushi rice, some additional jasmine rice from a 20-pound bag in the pantry.


The day before I made the heating pad had been Field Day at Max's school, and I'd hauled Sylvia around in her car seat for the morning -- swinging the seat to get her to sleep, carrying her up and down the stairs to an unused room in the basement to nurse her four times, and walking from field to classroom to cafeteria to accompany Max's class. My back was pooped. The heating pad was a good buddy right after I made it; it produces a moist heat that lasts about 15 or 20 minutes, and it's more malleable than a traditional heating pad. Very nice when, say, watching an episode of The War and knitting a long-abandoned scarf. Max also loved the pad, lolling all over it, apparently nursing his kindergarten aches and pains.

Reading comments on the Martha site, I found I could also use feed corn to fill the pads. One commenter even mentioned that buckwheat groats and seeds could be used, but hulls shouldn't be microwaved; I'm guessing they might be flammable. I didn't test this myself, but having set some popcorn-on-the-cob on fire in our microwave, I'm erring on the side of caution and staying away from the hulls.

After a quick and inexpensive trip to our bulk-stocking local health-food store, I made two more heating pads, one with corn and one with buckwheat groats, using some fabric extras I had around. (Yes, the image is on its side; my apologies.)



Here's how this quick craft stacks up financially:

• My original fabric was about $3, but I've had it long enough that I could probably consider it stash, in which case it would be free. Fat quarters are generally about $1 at basic craft stores, more at specialty fabric stores.
• The best price I could find on rice is 25 pounds for $15.00 at Costco, or 60 cents per pound. The pad needed about 2 pounds, so rice filling is about $1.20.
• The dried corn was 80 cents per pound, although it was organic and you could probably find cheaper non-organic if you were so inclined; my health-food store only carries organic. The pad needed about 2-1/2 pounds, so organic corn filling is about $2.00.
• The groats were $1.25 per pound. Again, these were organic so might be cheaper if you could find a non-organic source. The pad needed about 2 pounds, so buckwheat groat filling is about $2.50. (Martha's source also had groats, but they were $6.99 for 2 pounds, plus shipping.)

I found that the heating pads made with rice or groats need to be microwaved about 3 minutes, and the pad filled with corn needed to be microwaved about 4 minutes.

At around $3 each, I'm thinking that with a cute tag, these little stress relievers are going to be making appearances in the next year as teacher gifts, co-worker gifts, holiday gifts, just-because gifts...