Welcome back to I’m Gonna Pack It. Forty orders today, split into two videos, and I’m starting with the heaviest puzzle of the day so I stop standing here dreading it.

This is the Monday after the Friday-Thursday weekend that made us skip Saturday garage sales because we already had so much to ship. We don’t usually skip Saturdays. We skipped this one. The orders came in over the weekend and now I’m dropping a fresh blade in the box cutter and getting started — and I tell myself the same thing every single time I swap a blade: why did I wait so long? It’s a sixty-second job.

This post is Part 1 — 13 of the 40 packs. The headline is the spoon and the encyclopedia: cheapest box of the day on one end, $220 logistics-puzzle on the other.

The $47 spoon — first box, set the tone

[1:36] ICM Lauffer Italy Boca soup spoon — $47 on eBay. An expensive spoon. The kind of vintage Italian flatware where each piece is rare enough that you list them individually instead of lotting them up — because you want any imperfection on each spoon called out for that buyer specifically, and because lotting the set would cost us more than half the realized value over time. Slow movers, high per-piece price, the patience pays.

It also packs in about 90 seconds. Bubble wrap, bubble mailer, label, done. That’s the right way to start a 13-pack run — you knock out the easy one first and the math feels good in your head when you walk over to the harder packs.

The Bocomal jacket and the box-supply flex

[2:45] Bocomal FR Cat 4 duck-quilt jacket — going to Texas. Heavy coat, surprised me how heavy. I had the option to send it Ground Advantage in a free 12×12×12, and the math said yes. Six pounds in a 12-cube box on Ground Advantage usually beats UPS for that weight class to that part of the country, and the free part of the free Ground Advantage box is real.

Box selection is the quiet superpower of pack day. We’ve ordered a ton of Ground Advantage boxes from eBay over the months when they were easy to get — and we’ve stockpiled bubble mailers, 12×12×8s, and a stack of 16×12×10s. Lately Poshmark’s tightened the spigot — you order through the app and they apparently ration based on sales — so I keep more in storage than I need just in case. Today, having options means I get to pick the optimal carton on each pack instead of using whatever’s nearest.

The Halo controller box and the GI Joe lot for Kevin

[4:30] Halo 3 SPNKr Xbox 360 missile-controller case shell — $63 to Vinnie. Box only — no controllers, no inserts, just the carrier. We paid a dollar for it. That’s the kind of niche-collector pack where the price-to-effort ratio carries the whole afternoon.

[14:07] Multi-figure G.I. Joe Cobra lot — going to Kevin, the Tennessee Picker. Kevin’s the same Kevin who came on our podcast — “the reseller your mother warned you about.” He buys from us, we buy from him, and his note on this order is “for personal collection,” which is reseller code for death pile — same as ours. They might go up in value one day. They might.

The favorite Kevin story I’ll tell on the way to the bubble wrap: he once got an entire neighborhood to host a sale by putting flyers in mailboxes advertising a neighborhood sale that wasn’t actually happening. Then he showed up to shop at it. The neighbors, finding themselves committed by mailbox, had a sale. It’s now an annual thing. He kept the flyer trick to himself for years and the neighborhood never knew.

The shoulder pads, plastic-wrapped like an armadillo

[11:36] Schutt Y Flex 500 youth shoulder pads — paid $5, sold $25. They normally come pretty bulky. I plastic-wrapped them tight before listing — Candice called it “a little turtle in its shell,” I called it more of an armadillo — and the result was photos that looked smaller than the actual product, which made the listing read better and apparently moved them faster. The wrap also keeps the shipping volume down, which keeps the postage line down. Two birds.

The reels keep moving

[7:51] “Four Islanders” 35mm vintage reel lot — 2.02 lbs, going UPS Ground to Oregon. Johnny ordered it. The reels are an ongoing run — we picked up around a dozen cans of theater trailers in a private buy and we’re sorting them into ten or so lots of 25-30 reels each. We’ve sold about 250 reels (~10% of the haul) across 8 lots so far. Plenty of inventory ahead. I’ll ship more this week.

The Brighton wedges (Poshmark) and the bubble mailer that keeps shedding strips

[18:47] Brighton Skye platform wedge heels — $30 on Poshmark. Ground Advantage in a Poshmark box. Easy. The bubble mailers I’m reaching for kept losing those tiny adhesive-strip pull-tabs across the table all morning — minor pet peeve, doesn’t change anything, but it’s the sort of pack-day rhythm thing you start noticing after order eight.

The encyclopedia — the actual puzzle of the day

[20:30] 1961 Collier’s Encyclopedia complete set — $220 on Etsy, free shipping, going to Pennsylvania. Twenty-four volumes plus three yearbooks, currently pre-packed in four separate boxes. Each one is two 12×10×4s nested together with the volumes inside — past me made that choice for reasons present me cannot reconstruct. Three of the four boxes are about 25 lb; one is a touch lighter.

Free shipping means the postage comes off our $220, so the first question was: do I keep it as four shipments or combine them into two heavier packages?

Here’s the math, run on the three 25 lb boxes (the fourth’s a little smaller):

Option	Per package	Total (3-pkg)
UPS Ground, 4 separate	$32.69	~$98
UPS Ground, combined two-by-two	~$50	~$100
Media Mail, 4 separate	$22.47	~$67
Media Mail, combined two-by-two	$41.22	~$82

Combining cuts about $7 off the cheapest option. Not enough.

The math isn’t just the postage. A 50-lb book box gets handled rougher than a 25-lb book box. The 25-lb version is less likely to get dropped onto a corner, less likely to come apart at the tape line in a hub somewhere in Tennessee, and more likely to make our carrier’s life easier when she picks it up. That’s worth seven bucks. Four separate, Media Mail, $1 a box for Pirate Ship insurance.

So the actual outcome:

• Postage: ~$88 across four boxes via Pirate Ship Media Mail
• Insurance: $4 ($1/box, Pirate Ship)
• Total shipping: ~$92
• Cost: $20 paid for the set
• Sold: $220
• Estimated net after Etsy fees: ~$80

Eighty bucks net on a Pennsylvania-bound 1961 encyclopedia set out of a storage unit that we forgot we even had. That’s the win.

The boxes go out with thank-you cards in each one. [25:00] we’re cutting and re-labeling.

The closers

The last few packs of Part 1, quick:

• [17:32] Nintendo Game Boy / DS / Switch Lite mini carry backpack — $11.99. Bought it for $2 the day we picked it up; sold it within a week.
• [25:24] Lot of 12 Viktor & Rolf Flowerbomb perfume samples — $21.24 on Mercari, with the usual hazmat-label wrinkle that comes with shipping anything fragrance-classified.
• [27:02] Urban Decay All Nighter setting spray + 24/7 VICE eye pencil — same buyer, $24.98 total. We need to find a pallet of these.
• [28:38] Hasegawa 1/72 Hurricane Mk.I Late Type Battle of Britain plastic kit — $14.99. Niche, predictable, easy.

The lesson — pack-day is choices

Thirteen orders, four platforms across the day’s sales, and one shipping puzzle that took as long to think about as it did to execute. The encyclopedia decision wasn’t a math problem — the math problem is straightforward. It’s a how do I want this package to arrive problem. Four 25-pound boxes with insurance, going Media Mail, will land in better shape than two 50-pound boxes shipped UPS Ground for an extra dollar.

That’s a Shed-Flips-shaped answer to a Pack It-shaped question. The carrier’s life matters; the books’ arrival condition matters; the seven dollars matters less than either.

Part 2 has the other 27 orders. We’ll see y’all there.