Saturday, February 14, 2009

Goodwill Finds

Kyle went skiing with friends today so Q, Lucas and I piled in the car and headed out for a day of scavenging through Goodwill. After all it was half-price Saturday. We ended up hitting five stores.

Our first stop was the Happy Valley Road store. And here's proof that lightning DOES strike twice in the same place. This is the same store where I found a stack of Fiesta plates and bowls just two months ago. Well, today, I found MORE Fiesta--four white dinner plates. Incidentally, these are my first white plates. Not a big surprise to those who know me well. I also found a book of house floor plans. Total spent: $2.95.

Next, we went to the Union Hills Drive store. Zilch. Nada. Nothing. We left empty handed.

A few miles south was the Dunlap Avenue store. The only thing good was a book about volcanoes. Since I have to write a paper about a volcanic event, I thought this would come in handy for my research. Total spent: $1.49.

After lunch at a Mexican food restaurant, we were off to the Cave Creek Road store. Here, we saw some promising junk. Lucas found a Sega Genesis game controller, but it had some exposed wires so we passed. Q thought about buying a TV to replace the 13-inch one in our bedroom, but I urged him to wait until we could afford a plasma screen. Anyway, $25 seems like an awful lot to spend on a tube TV.

We did end up buying some of those modular particle board storage shelves that Target sells. I had been wanting some of these to fill in the bare area above our closet shelf. They had two available, so I bought one for the closet and one for Lucas to store his old school video game consoles. Total spent: $6.98

The Bell Road store turned out to be our go-to spot for plastic replacement parts. Here, I found a TV remote just like the one we have at home. Funny because these remotes are rentals from the cable company...they operate the digital cable boxes. It seems strange that a rented remote ended up at Goodwill, instead of being returned to Cox Cable, but whatever. Anyway, I only bought it for the battery cover. The clip on ours had cracked off and it was being held in place by duck tape.

Q also found a leaf vacuum for the pool. He already has one just like it, but a little plastic clip had broke off. Again, we bought it for that plastic part. Total spent: $3.48

After some screw tightening and a thorough cleaning, the particle board shelves looked almost new. Lucas has already put his to use:

I'm not sure if this was done by a Goodwill worker or the former owner, but my shelf had this piece of sage advice taped to it (click to enlarge if you need to).

2 comments:

MomAgain said...

so jealous. I've begun to lock myself up at home on the weekends in an effort to save money for conference. I never find fiesta at goodwill, anyway... but I miss going through the thrift stores. I only allow myself the one near the bank on payday. LOL.

Ms. Val said...

Kelly, you just have to be picky about what you buy. REALLY picky. Don't just buy something because it's cheap. In my case, anything I buy at Goodwill has to be cheap AND useful to me.

Going on half price day helps, too.