A Love Letter to the Stumbled-Across Garage Sale

This essay is part of a collection of love letters celebrating personal design obsessions.

One of my best garage sale finds to date is an old, honey-colored leather briefcase with two front buckles, a back zipper, and a few discolored patches. One could call it vintage, but that doesn’t tell the full story: I made the purchase from around 800 miles away in Chicago through my mother, who sent me a photo of the briefcase in a pile of children’s toys at a Long Island garage sale—a true diamond in the rough. The bag’s previous owner was the seller’s father, a retired something-or-other who had commuted with it daily from Long Island to New York City for decades. Soon to graduate college and start my first job in Manhattan, I was eager to wake the bag from its dormancy. "Yes, buy," I texted back. (I later paid her back for it, three dollars in full.)

During one of my first weeks at the new job, I got into the elevator with a colleague I did not know very well. I wracked my brain for conversation starters and breathed a sigh of relief when she complimented my briefcase. Surely the backstory of the bag would be enough to fill our time up to the eleventh floor. "Cool," replied my Manhattanite colleague, "Where’s Garage Sale?" I tried not to wince.

There are many names for the ad hoc sales characterized by patinaed silverware strewn on plastic tables and clunky mirrors propped up against trees: lawn sale, yard sale, tag sale. They’re known as car boot sales in the U.K., though those tend to lean more toward flea market than garage sale on the rummage retail spectrum, as they involve multiple people selling their unwanted goods in one place. And estate sales, though similar, usually happen for grimmer reasons than spring cleaning. Garage sales are typical of the suburbs, where people have lawn space to spread their belongings, but can be found in cities, too—look out for chalk sidewalk arrows leading to books, clothes, and household items hung on apartment stair railings (hence the moniker: stoop sale).

There is, I believe, a proper way to approach a garage sale: with a very open mind. Those motivated to score deep discounts on glassware or Christmas decorations may very well get them, but know that there are often treasures on the tables left ignored. I’ve taken home rolls of a beautiful toile-patterned wallpaper and hand-drawn plans for nearby buildings. I’ve found 19th-century manuals on writing with fragments of an unfinished novel scribbled on loose paper inside. At one sale, I dusted off several copies of Confessions of a Reluctant Long Island Psychic, presumably written by the homeowner herself (I can only imagine that’s why she owned multiples), though who’s to say.

Garage saling was a staple of my upbringing. In my Long Island suburb, warm weather sprouted flowers in gardens and neon sale signs on telephone poles; I looked forward to both pops of color with equal anticipation. Following one sign to the next was like a treasure hunt to areas I wouldn’t have otherwise explored, people I wouldn’t have otherwise met, and items I wouldn’t have otherwise encountered. My family once found an odd-looking metal structure that resembled the underbelly of a Victorian hoop skirt with several pegs protruding from each ring. The owner didn’t know what it was for. We took it home and hung mugs on it. Months later, I was sitting in an art history class in college when a lookalike of my family’s mug holder popped on screen: Marcel Duchamp’s Bottle Rack. It turns out we had been using the object almost as intended.

Nowadays, we can use our phones to track down sales and buy vintage and secondhand items, but I’ll still swerve off the road if I see a promising garage sign along the way. Sometimes you’ll find a cracked wok and some used cat toys, but you never know when you’ll come across the next Duchamp (or a good replica, at the very least). 

Top photo by Christa Boaz/Getty Images

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