Five bucks. That’s what Candice paid for a jewelry box at a garage sale last weekend — the whole box, with all the contents. What caught her eye was the stack of watches inside. What we actually pulled out, after we got it home and cracked it open on camera, was three pieces of 14k gold — including a tri-color Aura America clown pendant we’d never seen anything like. Best estimate on the total payout from a $5 box: north of $400.

That’s the headline. The rest of the video is a packing day — eBay, Poshmark, and Etsy orders going out — bookended by Lonnie’s two-day push to list 31 beer taps from last week’s haul and a closing one-and-done bulk listing on 173 vintage giveaway-plane noses we’ve been sitting on for a couple months.

The taps got listed: $1,113 across 31 beer taps

We opened the video with the totals from Lonnie’s listing marathon. 31 beer taps listed, $1,113 in total list price, about $36 a tap. A handful punched up the average; some came in around $20 each. Whether all of them sell at list is the next chapter, but the buy is fully listed and that’s the point — we picked them up Friday, started moving them by the following week.

The big sign from the same buy is staying in the shed. Lonnie wants it. It’s in rough shape — comp solds suggest about $120 if it were mint — but he likes it. “You might as well steal from your unlisted inventory.”

Packing day — eBay, Poshmark, Etsy

We ran orders across three platforms today. No Mercari this round, which is unusual but not surprising — Mercari’s our fourth platform; some days it sits one out.

A few orders worth pulling out:

[2:18] Lot of 16 vintage Air Combat magazines, 1977-1980 — $39. These had been sitting in 12A for a long time. Niche category, patient buyer.

[3:51] Six shades of Urban Decay 24/7 eyeliner — $79.94. Same buyer pulled six pieces out of the bolo drawer. Cosmetics have been quietly strong for us; the discontinued shades especially. Sometimes a single-listing buyer ends up clearing half a category.

[5:11] 5-car vintage Pinewood Derby lot — $26.99 with a note. The buyer wrote to say they were buying the cars to donate to a local Scout troop — for kids who don’t have anyone at home to help them build one. We don’t get many notes like that. Worth slowing down on.

[7:05] Be-Bop Deluxe Live in the Air Age 15CD+DVD limited edition — $124.99. This might be the last copy we have. We did really well on this set; if you ever come across them in a lot, don’t pass.

[7:21] Lucky Brand Basimi black leather moto ankle boots, size 10 — $35.99. Lonnie still doesn’t know what “moto style” means as a category. Neither do I. We just call them ankle boots with buckles when somebody asks.

[8:13] Bob Mackie 22-inch porcelain doll on Etsy — $100. Lonnie called her a Barbie at first; she is not a Barbie. She’s a Legendary Beauties porcelain doll. Big old box, big old sucker, sold to an Etsy buyer who wanted exactly that.

The Lucchese boot dust covers came up again today — a Shiner Bock tap, a few magazines, another pair of dust covers on Poshmark. The salesman’s-collection inventory keeps moving.

The $5 jewelry box

This is where the video earns its title.

At 9:18 in the video, Candice picked up a small jewelry box at a garage sale last weekend. $5 for the box and everything in it. The watches in the top tray were what caught her eye, but the rule we’ve learned the hard way is that in a stash like this, the gold is usually somewhere else. Most of the contents — earrings without a match, a brooch, broken pieces in the drawers — turned out to be cheap 80s/90s costume stuff. Worth a lot listing, not much else.

But three pieces tested as 14k.

[9:57] An Aura America tri-color clown pendant — 1.76g, marked 14k. That little heart-shaped maker’s mark with the “OR” inside is Aura America’s. Three colors of gold (yellow, white, rose) stacked together gives the clown a depth you don’t expect from something that small. Scrap value at today’s gold runs around $150; we’re listing it on eBay at $200. We found one comparable currently active at $595 — somebody shooting it in the dark, in Lonnie’s words, but it tells us the ceiling is well north of scrap. Our $200 list is the sober middle.

[10:51] A flower brooch with rubies and what look like diamond chips — also marked 14k. Total weight 1.28g, but the stones are pulling some of that weight, so call it under a gram of actual gold. Listing at $100-150. Honest description; we’ll let the photos and the loop-mark do the talking.

[11:43] A pair of unmarked earrings that passed the 14k scratch test. Total weight 1.5g for the pair. The thing about unmarked precious metal is that we believe it tested as 14k, but a buyer on eBay would have every right to be skeptical, and that opens us up to the kind of return-and-swap scam that costs you both the item and the original. So these aren’t going on eBay.

The plan: I’m picking up Molly from band practice tomorrow and the local jeweler is right there. We’ll let them test the pair and offer what they offer. Half scrap is the floor; if they come in well below half scrap, we walk. As long as it’s not insulting, we’ll take it — about $90 to $130 in our pocket from earrings that came out of a $5 box.

At 12:46, there’s also a really nice Seiko in there with a diamond-cut crystal and an ombre brushed-metal dial. Japan movement. We haven’t researched it yet. Add that to the running tally; we’ll get into the watches in a future video.

This is exactly the kind of buy where Lonnie’s “I’d rather do this than buy a scratch-off ticket” framing earns its keep. $5 in, three pieces of 14k gold confirmed plus an interesting Seiko, projected payout north of $400. That’s a long way from a Powerball.

One and done — 173 Lion Petroleum giveaway plane noses

We closed the video at 15:05 with another inventory item we’ve been sitting on. A couple months back, we paid $20 (give or take $5) for a pile of vintage Lion Petroleum giveaway airplane noses at a garage sale. Counted them up today: 173 of them, plus one we kept for the shelf.

The math we ran: could we sell them in lots of 10, seventeen times, at $15-20 a lot? On vintage Lion motor-oil promo plastic? No, we don’t see it. That’s not a hot enough commodity to support 17 separate buyers.

So one bulk listing. $100 for all 173 of them on eBay, one and done. Maybe a flea-market booth seller picks them up to sell at $2 each. Maybe a collector grabs them for a giveaway. We don’t have to know who the buyer is — we just need one.

We’ll leave money on the table on this one. We do that often. The math we care about is how fast can the listing be live and the inventory off the shelf. $100 in for $20-25 spent is a clean trade for the bench space.

What we’d do differently

Honestly, not much to change. This was a clean day:

• Trust the jewelry-box hunch. Watches up top, gold somewhere else. Five-dollar boxes go in the cart.
• Don’t list unmarked precious metal on eBay. Take it to the local jeweler. Half-scrap-or-better and you walk away clean; below that, you walk away.
• Ship the bulk listing instead of fighting for parted-out margin when the category isn’t strong enough to support multiple buyers. 173 plane noses at $100 in one transaction beats 17 separate listings, 17 separate buyers, 17 separate returns risks, over 17 separate weeks.

That’s the day. One $5 box, three pieces of 14k, $1,113 in tap listings already up, and 173 plane noses out the door for $100. Solid Friday.

Thanks so much for watching. We’ll see y’all again very soon.

References

• Aura America jewelry maker’s mark — the heart with “OR” inside is the AA hallmark; useful if you find an unidentifiable maker’s mark on a piece.
• eBay sold-listings filter — for any unfamiliar item, the only comp source we trust. Active listings (like the $595 Aura clown we found) tell you the ceiling someone is reaching for, not the price the market actually pays.
• Rev Resale — Rev and Nikki T’s reselling channel. Recurring reference around here.
• The earlier beer-tap haul covered in we bought 30+ beer tap handles for $150 — the same buy, now fully listed.

---

Mentioned in this episode

As an Amazon Associate, Shed Flips earns from qualifying purchases. The links below are affiliate links — clicking them and buying anything (the linked item or otherwise) helps support the channel at no extra cost to you.

• Gold testing kit
• Jeweler's loupe