Tales of Tools and Thrift Stores

The house sold around Independence Day. Closing, six weeks later. In a normal move, you can just move the crap you don’t want to deal with. But this wasn’t a normal move. We’re not buying or renting another place—we’re squatting for a while before we hit the road, full time.  We had nowhere to move junk about which we were ambivalent. We were a cheap furniture store’s cheesy midnight TV commercial; EVERYTHING. MUST. GO.

It was like we had to clean out the house after we both died. Surreal.

We started making piles. Bought a boatload of Post-It notes. Within a week or two, everything in the house was either bound for the dump in a black plastic trash bag or labeled with a Post-It note. “Kids.” “Goodwill.” “Paul C.” “Paul P.” “2Chance.” And so on.

This plan worked OK, until it became evident that the brand name Post-It notes I spent hard-earned money on wouldn’t stick to anything. They were crap. They probably would have fallen off flypaper. A brand new box (of a million, I think) went into a black plastic bag. Fortunately, we had an older batch that stuck. But not nearly enough of them. So I sawed each pad in half to double the number. That worked well enough. When we ran out, blue masking tape, which is what we should have used to begin with.

Moving Lesson Learned Too Late, Number 1: To Label Your Crap, Use Blue Masking Tape.

Although we’re not buying or renting, we are going to be living in a house, temporarily. Mom’s house. I’m not even there yet and my honey-do list is already as long as a CVS receipt. The place was built in the early 60s. It has lots of issues. Mom doesn’t get around too well, these days. Plus, she was never a hammer-and-screwdriver kind of gal, and the extended family really only tends to emergencies.

Dad’s been gone over 10 years. But Dad wasn’t exactly enthusiastic about home maintenance when he was alive, so there’s wasn’t much difference before and after. This is the guy who wired a fat Wiffle bat to the sump pump when the float went bad. Ingenious, as a stopgap. Problem was, Dad didn’t understand the concept of stopgap. His motto was “good enough for now.” And by “now,” he meant “the next 100 years.” Or until it explodes, taking the rest of the house with it. Whichever comes first.

This was my excuse for getting rid of very few tools. I know, I know. Tools are to an American man with a five-bedroom house as shoes were to Imelda Marcos. I get that. I admit I have a problem. But when it’s midnight, you’re up to your ass in septic tank effluent and you need a wrench the size of a tennis racket, it gives you an enormous sense of satisfaction to grab it your own bag instead of paying a plumber $300 to bring his.

OK, that’s a bit of a dramatization, but you get the idea.

For the record, I gave away a lot of tools. Granted, they were mostly dupes, but, hey, throw me a bone here. At least I saved them from the dump. And, after all, how many 5/8 inch box wrenches does one guy really need?

Dominic took quite a few. He’s the newbie on the block, a young dad with little kids, only just beginning his tool collection obsession. He’s a builder, so he’s already got a head start, but he’s still near the ground floor. Dom was my go-to after my own kids. “Hey, Dom, ya need a thingamawhatchit?” I’d text. And he would invariably text back “Yeah!” He’s the man. I’d rather see a tool go to another tool guy than end up on the scrap heap.

On the final day, sweeping the shed, I found a ball-peen hammer that looked like a movie prop for Thor. It was the biggest ball-peen hammer I’d ever seen. (Having completely forgotten I owned it, I had zero memory of ever seeing it before.) At that moment, another neighbor, Larry, was also in the shed, attempting to match some shed tools with the confetti of “Larry” Post-It notes littering the floor.

“Holy crap! Would you look at the size of that hammer? Where the hell did that thing come from?!” I wondered, aloud.

“I didn’t know they made them that big,” came Larry’s reply.

“Ya want it?”

“Sure,” he said. “It will collect dust in my garage for five years. Then I’ll give it to Dom.”

Donald was another tool savior. Donald lives around the corner on a small farm, a warren of the house, barn and a bunch of outbuildings. He grows sunflowers in the summer, creating a lovely local landmark. Donald also loves old stuff. He collects things all year, filling up the sheds, then gets rid of some at a big barn sale he throws every year around Labor Day. I stopped to ask if he wanted any stuff for the sale. He wasn’t sure if was having the sale with the pandemic and all, but he said yes. “I always have room for more stuff,” he said.

Add a few “Donald” Post-Its to the boxes. Maybe we’ll get lucky and they’ll actually stick.

Surveying the piles, one friend exclaimed, “This is BS. Just dump it. Why are working so hard?”

This is a guy who has obviously never been inside a thrift store. But he made a valid point. Two reasons: she’s Scottish, I’m Sicilian. Neither can stand letting things go to waste. We just can’t bring ourselves to throw away perfectly serviceable items we just didn’t happen to need any longer.

An honorable goal. But time consuming as hell. By the time we were 48 hours away from closing, we were near complete panic mode. I realized a big reason was the fact that most of the stuff we gave away, we delivered.

Moving Lesson Learned Too Late, 2: Don’t Deliver Crap You’re Giving Away. Let Them Come Pick It Up.

Easier said than done. Had we stuck to that policy, the house would have been filled with even more crap, 48 hours from closing. Half the people who said they were coming would not have shown up, I am certain.

So, we spent precious hours delivering. After all, we had six weeks. That seemed like plenty of time. It wasn’t.

We made way too many trips to the dump, hauling actual trash. I figured around 12 trips at a quarter-ton each, for a grand total of three tons. Conservatively. Huge time suck. But, we’ve had an inside view of thrift store management for some years and we weren’t about to bring garbage to the thrift store, which is what a lot of people do. Thrift stores really, really don’t want your old family photo albums. Your middle school homework. Your broken Billy Big Mouth Bass singing fish that hasn’t sung since the Clinton administration. I could go on.

Moving Lesson Learned Too Late, 3: Next Time, Rent a Freakin’ Dumpster.

Four full trailer loads went to Goodwill, including a fifth trip that was a complete waste. The website says “open ‘til 9.” I got there at 7 to witness the last employee leave and lock the door. What gives? A tiny scrap of paper taped to the front window told the story: “Special COVID-19 hours.” Can you update the website? How hard would that be? Why Goodwill? Because they’ll take stuff other thrift stores won’t, like textbooks, computer software and old videotapes.

A lot of items got the “2Chance” label. Second Chance is our “home” thrift store, so to speak, the one run by our church in the resort town of Ocean City, N.J. It’s one of the nicest, cleanest and most pleasant thrift stores you’ll ever see, which poses a bit of a problem. Their standards are high and they are very selective about the merchandise they accept. Their typical customer is a vacationing middle-aged woman from Broomall, Pa. And vacationing middle-aged women from Broomall, Pa. have no use for old textbooks, electronics, computer software and videotapes. Since space is limited, Second Chance will either refuse such items or dispose of them.

One day, Beth was leaving Second Chance after a subsequent donation run, when she ran into a woman carrying the cake stand we had donated a few days earlier. “Hey! That’s my cake stand!” said Beth. The other woman was momentarily baffled. Beth let her off the hook. “I donated that. I’m so happy to see it get a new home!”

“Oh my God,” said the other woman. “I’ve been looking for one of these for years. it’s perfect!”

That’s when Beth noticed the young lad with the woman. He had a wooden USA map under his arm, with holes to accommodate bottle caps. The idea is to plug in a cap from all 50 states as a convenient collection point. We’d donated the map, too.

“What are you doing with that map?” Beth asked.

“My granddad and I used to collect root beer bottle caps. He died a little bit ago. So I’m gonna put the caps we collected together in the map to remember him.

That brought Beth to tears. Seriously, would we have heard either of these stories if we’d just taken the cake stand and the bottle cap map to the dump? Unlikely.

But we had another thrift store in the mix. I’m a nerd in many universes: music, motorcycles, ham radio, electronics, cooking. When we still owned a five-bedroom house with room to stuff with stuff, Second Chance would call me when such items came in as donations. They couldn’t get rid of them. So, I’d either help value them, find them a home or just buy them.

The stuff I bought was added to my existing pile of nerd gear. How to get rid of it all? Can’t take it back to Second Chance.

Enter Philly AIDS Thrift, an amazing thrift store, one of our all-time favorites. Their clientele is as weird and nerdy as we. Weighing the nerd factor of our crap piles, we knew we’d have to make at least one trip there.

So, one fine fall day, we stuffed the car with radios, accordions, computer stuff, motorcycle gear, old movies, vinyl records—on the Venn diagram, too weird for Second Chance, too cool for Goodwill. An all-day endeavor. (Talk about commitment.)

We pulled up and the bearded millennials working there jumped into action to help us unload. “Oh, man! Look at this,” we overheard. “This stuff is awesome.” “I’m taking this home. It’s not even going on the shelf!” By the time the car was empty, one of them yelled, “We love you guys!”

That trip was so worth it.

Two accordions were earmarked for Philly AIDS. But I held one back. On the way up, Beth was on the phone with a dear old friend we hadn’t seen in a long time, coordinating a visit. Knowing she plays accordion, I said, “ask her if she wants another accordion.”

I was kidding. Nobody wants another accordion. So you can imagine my shock when she said yes. Turns out, she’d lost her accordion in the divorce.

You lost your accordion in the divorce?! Man, that’s a whole new level of nerdery. Makes me look like an amateur. We delivered. She loved it. And now we have another crazy, amazing accordion story to tell.

And, unlike this next one, it’s true!

So, this accordion player comes home from a gig at two in the morning. He drags himself upstairs, puts on his pajamas, brushes his teeth and falls into bed, exhausted.

“Oh, crap!” he thinks. “I left the accordion in the car!” But he’s so tired. He has to get up in a few hours to go to work and he’s sound asleep before he can will himself to retrieve it.

The next morning, he walks out to find the car window smashed. “Oh, no! My squeezebox!” he thinks, running to the car.

He looks in and sees six more accordions.

TO BE CONTINUED

Want to see the next chapter? Please subscribe. And thanks.

See Chapter One.

2020 move