Hello all, this is Gary’s son Mike. I have been trying figure out everything dad had going on online and it seems as though there were a few projects in the works but this was his baby that he tended to every day.

For the short term, 1 or 2 months, this site and the garage sale challenge site will remain up and running. Please feel free to use the forums and continue with your own garage sale challenge.

The long term has yet to be decided, I know that I am no auction rebel and am sure that all of you would fit that title more then me. Therefore I would like your feedback, thoughts, ideas about what the fate of theaucitonrebel.com should be. Is the site useful as is or does the information get outdated like dad’s computer that I’m typing this on? No idea is a bad idea, well except if you suggest I take it over, we will all go broke then since I don’t have dad’s eye for buying the 25 cent item at a garage sale that will sell for hundreds or more online.

I look forward to hearing your ideas and thoughts.

Thanks,

Mike Hendrickson

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Two summers ago, the 30″ walleye to the left was tied for the largest walleye caught out of the resort we go to each year in Ontario, Canada. Last year didn’t produce anything larger than 25″ but with a little luck we can make the fellow above look small this year.

We leave early tomorrow morning and will be back home sometime Saturday the 20th. The weather forecast up there for next week looks a little damp, but it sounds like the fishing is good right now.

In the meantime I have 39 Challenge auctions that will start Sunday evening and run through the 21st.

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This coming Saturday, the convention center in Grand Forks is holding the 1st Annual Anything Goes Garage Sale, Flea Market, Swap Meet in it’s main arena/convention area.

They had originally hoped to attract 200 people to set up. They stopped taking registrations several weeks ago when 347 people had registered because they ran out of room to put them.

I’m wondering how many hundreds of people will be waiting in line at 8 am Saturday morning when they open the doors to the public. Will there be some people who will actually camp outside the entrance Friday night so they can be one of the first few in line?

It should be an interesting event and it will also be interesting to see how it affects the general garage sale situation in town both this weekend and for the rest of the summer.

Normally this time of year there would likely be between fifty and sixty fresh sales starting this weekend, so it will be interesting to see how many people want to compete with this sale. It will also be interesting to see if that many people taking part in the event will dramatically decrease the number of sales we see throughout the remainder of the summer.

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Yesterday evening I was reading a post on Mitzi’s Vintage+Goodness=Happiness blog titled Too much new on Etsy to fit it into one title!. In it she mentioned a group of 1970’s workplace safety posters she had recently acquired and listed.

Mitzi’s post started me thinking that I have quite a few food related advertising posters from the same time period sitting in that garage that I really should get on eBay. And that got me thinking about the day I threw away forty to fifty old posters that would, today, bring well over $20,000 on eBay.

Sometime in 1959, an issue of the now defunct Sports Car Graphic magazine came into my possession. That magazine spawned what was to become a life-long interest in Formula One auto racing and old sports cars.
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Just a few miscellaneous thoughts about my first weekend of serious garage saling.

Friday began at 5:30 am when I left the house for the 110 mile drive to Barnesville, Minnesota for the first day of their Spring City-Wide Garage Sale. It was a little cool when I left in the morning but by the time I got to Barnesville it had warmed up enough so that the shorts I was wearing were comfortable all day.

The “official” sale list and map showed 60 sales, but there had to be at least another 20 to 30 people who didn’t bother to get their sale on the list. While I didn’t buy as much as I did at their Fall Sale last year, there was still plenty of interesting stuff available. It took me between six and seven hours to cover them all and I came home with enough new inventory to definitely make the trip worthwhile.

Saturday was a little different. My list of new sales in Grand Forks contained only three sales. Saturday was a jeans, sweatshirt, and vest day and when I left home at 7:30 in the morning I had to brush the snow off the car windows before I got started.
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It was a typical February day in North Dakota when I left home this morning to make the rounds of the thrift stores. Snowing, windy, and -4 degrees with a wind chill factor of -25 to -35 degrees. At least it finding a place to park in any of the parking lots wasn’t a problem.

The day’s only purchase came from St. Vincent De Paul where I paid $1 for “Jochen Peiper Battlecommander SS Liebstandarte Adolf Hitler”. I ran the ISBN through ScoutPal to find a total of 50 listings. The lowest price was $4.62 and 26 copies were priced under $9.45.

Certainly not a book with much potential at first glance. But the more I looked at it, the more my gut told me it had possibilities. In the end I paid $1 for it and walked out the door telling myself I’d probably be kicking myself for the purchase.
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Cold and windy could best describe the weather this morning when I grabbed a cup of coffee from the Holiday gas station and headed for the first thrift store of the day.

There wasn’t much to get excited about at any of the thrift stores. My only purchase was a copy of “Where’s Waldo?” that I bought at the Dakota Boys Ranch for $1.00.

This will go into the book case along with two other Waldo books I already have. They will wait until I find one or two more and will then be listed as a lot on eBay.

These books are worth picking up when you can find them for a dollar or so.

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Today’s thrift store adventures can pretty much be summed up in one short sentence. “Six thrift stores, one book.” (Actually, I guess that isn’t even a sentence.)

The day’s lone purchase came at St. Vincent de Paul where I spent $.50 for “Blessing In Disguise”, book six in Lauraine Snelling’s “Red River Of The North Series”. It has found a place on the book shelf along with book one, two, three, and four from the same series. When I find book five they will be listed on eBay in the auction format.

This is Lauraine Snelling’s most popular series and the complete six book set will regularly bring between $30 and $45, sometimes a little more, on eBay.
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Today’s trip to the thrift stores in Grand Forks produced four different items to be listed on eBay. My original intention was to make one of them a “Fixed Price” listing and list the other three in the auction format starting next Sunday.

Somewhere between when I left the last thrift store and when I started writing the ads this afternoon I changed my mind with the result of all four items being listed in the Fixed Price format.

The Salvation Army thrift store had two sets of books by popular author Bodie Thoene. These were all marked $1 but they were having a half price promotion on books so my total cost for all eight books was $4.

The Shiloh Legacy, shown above, is a three book series. There have been ten of these sets listed on eBay in the last ninety days. Seven of them sold for prices ranging from $5.00 to $14.95 with an average sales price of $9.17. The other three didn’t sell. I listed them at a Fixed Price of $15.99 with free shipping.
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Fortified with a cup of “Dark Blend” coffee from a Holiday gas station and a sausage biscuit from the nearby Hardees I made a trip to all six of our local thrift stores this morning.

The first three stops were Dakota Boys Ranch, The Salvation Army, and Goodwill. I struck out at all three although I did see a nice Kodak 4600 Carousel slide projector that would have been a bargain at $5. On closer inspection though, the lens was cracked making it pretty much useless.
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