Palm Springs Vintage

Palm Springs is a meager two hour drive from LA but it feels like another world entirely. The desert air, the sunsets on surrounding mountains, the sea of stark windmills all wax off the denseness of Los Angeles. This little desert town where the yards all have pools and the architecture transports you back in time to era of casual glitz is one of my favorite places.

Full of Mid Mod Vintage stores and gay men with fabulous taste leaves the thrift stores here either scoured or sorely expensive for a reseller but I always try my luck because you never know what may have just come in the door, and the furnishings like the architecture pang me with jealous delight.


Ever since my stay in Paris a little more than a year ago that had us holed up in the quaintest studio apartment I've been a fan of vacation home rentals vs. hotels. So when my friend Amy decided to host her birthday bash at a desert pad I was in. We stayed in 50's Palm Spring style, the way it should always be.


I was able to get away for a couple of hours on Saturday and hit up two of my go-to thrift stores, Revival and Angel View Thrift. Both are a bit over priced but I did manage to come home with some cool new decor items and some fabric for a DIY project I have lined up.




As usual readers of this blog get first dibs on items seen here. These will be posted on Etsy tomorrow so if you see something you like send me an email at: SellingVintage@Gmail.com

Oh! So, Blue...

Remember how I was telling you that my thrifting luck comes in color? Orange was full of enamel ashtrays and, oh those Fiesta Salt & Pepper Shakers. Most recently I've happened upon yellow but in between one of my favorite colors was forgot... blue. Here it is in all it's glory, you may have seen some of these before so I feel words are not necessary, just pictures.











I hope you enjoyed!

A Mint Condition

In the previous post I highlighted passes for last week, yes, I'm a bit behind on my posts and as you can see from the passes I was not busy last week therefore... I don't know, the dog ate my homework?

Under normal circumstances I would wait to post about a pass and I'd do it with many more, but I'm finding it difficult to wait on this one because I cannot get it out of my head. I really like this table, on the verge of mint condition it was way worth the $46 The Salvation Army wanted. I'm sure it will be gone when Friday rolls around and I make my way back to the OC but I'll check - should I buy it? Remember, I have to "try" to resell it.

OC Bound

Oh, tomorrow is such an exciting day. I love heading to the OC with my car packed full, I love filing all the toys into my booth, and I'm so excited to see if anything sold. Part of me suspects that I won't have a ticket to my name since all of my goodies were priced fairly high but I really really hope that suspicion is wrong. It'll be so thrilling to see which items went and what people will pay for these things. I mean, it is completely possible that I'm the only fool out there who would be willing to pay $80.00 for a fondue pot - it's possible.

Check back tomorrow to see what sold, or not.

Driving Vintage

Buying vintage is fun but finding vintage that you can't buy due to size constraints is not. Four months ago I was dying for a sports car, specifically the Audi TT, but the stars never aligned and I was stuck driving the wreck of a VW Golf that I'm driving today. This turned out to be a very good thing, I lost my job and would never have been able to afford that car and now I can buy a car that will actually be useful in transporting all kinds of goodies - can you imagine trying to move a baker's rack with an Audi TT, good luck.

Purgatory isn't such a bad place, the VW Golf has decent cargo space, it enabled me to take home that great little desk, but it is entirely not capable of hauling the table I am oh so obsessed with. The one I've already highlighted twice on this very blog and visited again today only to find out that it was not only half off the price tag but an additional 30% on top of that - and still I cannot pack it up and bring it home.

And so the hunt continues, not for vintage but for a car, a car capable of hauling vintage, that is fuel efficient, and stylish. Let me just say that the search for a car is not nearly as fun as scouring thrift stores for cute bric-brac, in fact it's quite nauseating. I have a budget, I have expectations and nothing seems to meet my expectations and so I keep looking, and looking. So far I've narrowed it down to a few roomy, and one not as roomy (hey, it's cute) and for what they are, they kind of like the environment too.

This could be my favorite of the four. It has good ratings and reviews, I think the only bad review was the ergonomics of the driver and passenger seat. Mitsubishi Outlander:



Next up we have the Saturn Vue, I really like the body style but reviews - comme ci comme ca:



I've owned a VW for almost six years, at first I loved it, and still I'll tell you the engine is quality but dang the rest of it just falls apart! With that said, I'm considering another, the Jetta wagon:



And finally the Subaru WRX wagon, so cute! I've always loved this car but it's proving to be quite difficult to find one in my price range, and honestly I wonder about the cargo space:



So there it is, four semi-affordable vehicles that will get me what I need and want. I'm actually quite excited to get a new car, it's the leg work that drives me nuts.

This weeks pass.

What to buy is never a sure bet, either the price tag makes me question the likely hood of a profit or I'm not 100% about the item all together, sometimes it's a question of both, and every now and then size really matters. Although I am working on some ideas about how to overcome the storage obstacle, I've yet to figure out the pricing obstacle, which I imagine will come in due time.

I've decided to post a weekly blog highlighting items I've passed on, but due to the fact that I only decided this yesterday this weeks blog is going to be a bit slim. I'll do my best to take pictures and remember the cost, but every now and then I'll probably slip up - it's what I do. And I would love to hear your thoughts - tell me, do you agree with my decision or are you in love, should I have jumped?

The first item here you saw highlighted on yesterday's blog, this is a white Formica (I think, I'm no expert) table that seats four with two additional leafs to seat six or eight, the number of pretty blue chairs it comes with. One chair had a big gauge in the middle, another had a small one on the side, and the third was taped with green duct tape where it was coming apart on the bottom near the seat. All of which could be covered with a little creativity. Asking price - $125.



Here we have a hanging wine rack - $10 at the Salvation Army.



Today when I was out and about I decided to skip on this cute little lamp shade that was going for $3 at the UCLA Thrift Store.



I also passed on a pair of 70's style sugar and flour containers, white with a brown floral pattern ($5), a rough piece of desk with great form that had seen better days ($10), and due to transportation and fear of breaking glass I had to let the sweet little vanity that I probably would've kept go ($150). But I did get this adorable scallop chair that fit it perfectly.



More to come on the things I actually did buy tomorrow.

Free

Another late night weeding through Craigslist, this time I went for it - FREE. What I thought would be complete junk resulted in some interesting finds, some good, some strange, some good to know and others... junk. I found free yarn, a lot of it according to the women who never followed through with her soon faded passion for knitting; free used doggy chew toys, I understand that it's a dog but something about that is gross to me; a free BOAT, it doesn't come with a trailer and there's no picture but it's a boat; and if you're looking to landscape your yard go here first there's sand, and gravel and dirt - tons of dirt, and plants; and plenty of wood, I feel a beach bonfire coming on soon. And then there's the "curb alerts", people just toss their stuff on a curb and hope it finds a new home, they post the address on craigslist and the race is on.

Around 10:00pm this evening I fell for a curb alert posted only 15 minutes before, I begged my boyfriend Scott to go with me, after all I would need help loading that "Trunk (Heavy, dark, antique looking)" that I was certain would still be there. An hour after the post we pull up at 1522 Michigan avenue and nothing. I am shocked, I circle the street like a stalker, creeping around until finally I'm convinced that someone beat me to the scene. But I'm not the only one, in the two minutes it took me to leave I saw two other cars creeping and turning, stopping and going, and I realized then that an hour is a long time in the "CL" world.

Determining Worth

Suddenly I've come to the realization that I don't have enough furniture - it's Bric-Brac galore with no place to display these treasures. And so what's a girl to do but shop! I need bookshelves, a wall-unit, display case, how about credenza or hutch, cabinet? A clothing rack and shoe rack. I look in LA and OC, and all that I find is over-priced everything. Yes, it is worth it, I would ask for those prices too but people, come on, I need something fabulous and I'm a girl who can't wait.

I weed through the abyss of Craigslist like a hunter - a wish list of the all to obvious keywords that result in the perfect and the far too expensive piece. Moving on to the general brings in some negotiable results but it's late and so I wait for tomorrow, wondering what they're all worth. There's the matter of transportation needing to be added to the cost - I'll rent a truck, then how do I physically move it, hire a mover? Great that's $50 bucks and couldn't they just take off with my stuff? Now things are adding up.

Take the chairs for example, two gorgeous wicker chairs purchased in fair condition from a thrift store. I love their lines, and I envision them cleaned up and painted black, they are my dream of an outdoor chair, and with summer on the horizon this could really sell - but for what? I spent more money on paint than I did on the actual chairs, and I'm thrilled with the result but is there anyone out there who will want them as badly as I do? Anyone willing to pay $100 for the pair? That's a reasonable number, in fact they're so unique I think I could go higher, maybe $150 - that could be worth it. But now I'm thinking $175 and wondering if it will ever end, the determination of worth.

A quick SwagBucks search results in: a collection of any kind is only worth as much as someone is willing to pay for it - brilliant! *SIGH*