Thursday, 6:45 PM. We don’t usually start a pack session this late. We started this one this late because we’d both spent the afternoon listing, Candice had to pick Molly up and run errands, and the orders weren’t going to ship themselves before Friday morning’s garage-sale route. Either we knocked them out tonight and walked into Friday clean, or we’d be standing at the desk all morning instead of out at sales. We picked tonight.

So this is a packing-while-tired video. 14 eBay orders, about $520 gross. The headline is a four-piece FiestaWare set that Candice listed and Lonnie had to pack — and would not stop complaining about for the duration. Hence the apology. (The complaining, to be clear, is to Candice; the apology is to her. The plates didn’t do anything wrong.)

The complaint, on the record

We’ll just get this out of the way up front. [12:01] Homer Laughlin FiestaWare Tangerine four-piece place setting, sold for $32 on eBay. Candice listed it for $36; the buyer offered, the offer stuck. Fine. Reasonable sale.

What happened next was Lonnie standing at the packing table announcing he was going to do “$32 worth of complaining” about it — and then doing exactly that. The bit, for the record:

“I don’t hate lavender for plates. I just hate plates. Unless it’s got a bunch of food on it and I’m about to eat it. Plates are something I just don’t like packing.”

Lonnie hates packing breakables. He’ll do the math on a glass set in his head and admit out loud they sell for good money. He still doesn’t like it. “I do make money on the breakables, but I’m going to cuss about it every time.” Halfway through the FiestaWare pack he caught himself and apologized — “I’m sorry, Candace. I’ll just stop.” He did not stop. Two minutes later he was reminding the camera that “Rev complains too when they buy breakables,” which is true (we watch Rev Resale and Rev does in fact complain about breakables) — but it doesn’t actually exonerate the original complaint, just establishes that Lonnie is in good company.

For anyone selling FiestaWare: Candice mentioned in the video that lavender used to be one of the rare discontinued colors, and Homer Laughlin has now reissued it. So if you find lavender at a thrift store, it might be the new one, not the old one — and that’ll quietly soften the value of the older lavender pieces too. Worth checking the backstamp before you list.

The dread pack: the Easton Press Steinbeck

The pack Lonnie was actually dreading was the book. [9:18] Steinbeck — The Pearl / The Long Valley, Easton Press 1997 leather, sold for $79.99 on eBay. Highest-value pack of the night, and the one he wanted to do first to “stop standing here dreading it.” Easton Press leathers are nice books — gilt-edged, leatherbound, ribbon marker — and at $80 the buyer is going to inspect the corners when it shows up. Lonnie went heavy on the box: extra cardboard, extra padding, the works.

There’s a callback to this one at the end of the video that we’ll get to in a minute.

The corset and the vinyl-mailer trick

[5:35] Red and black brocade boned corset, $22.49 on eBay. The pack-decision question on this one was: bubble mailer, poly mailer, or a box? It looks soft, so a poly seems fine. The problem is the boning — the rigid plastic stays sewn into the seams. Stuff a bubble mailer through a tight mailbox slot at the destination and the boning snaps. So this one went vinyl mailer, sized loose enough that nobody can fold it forcibly.

If you sell anything with structural rigidity inside soft fabric — corsets, bras with underwire, structured handbags — the same logic applies. The packaging isn’t protecting the item from drops; it’s protecting the item from the delivery person’s last 30 seconds.

The $5 fill-a-bag is still earning

[28:01] Huge lot of buttons, $24.99 on eBay. This was a “what is this?” moment opening the box. Thousands of buttons. Came out of the $5 fill-a-bag we hit a few weeks back — fill a kitchen-size trash bag with whatever you can grab, pay $5, walk away. That same bag also produced the [30:46] Dritz collectible chair pin cushion (NIB), $24.99 on eBay, which we’d already sold and had to dig back out of inventory tonight. That’s $50 in sales out of a $5 bag and we haven’t even pulled the rest of it yet.

Side note on the buttons: Lonnie used a handful of them as fill in another order’s box to take up empty space. So before they even left the shed, those buttons earned twice — once as the listing, and once as packing material on someone else’s order. That’ll never not be funny.

The hidden second Italiana

The closer was a surprise. After 33 minutes of packing, Lonnie pulled what he thought was the last item — and found a second Easton Press leather hiding on the shelf, spine turned backward so we couldn’t read the title. [33:51] “Hey, we got another Italiana back here.”

If you’ve watched the channel for a minute, “Italiana” / “Taliana” is the running joke from the Encyclopedia of Italian Cuisine bit. It’s now also Lonnie’s pet name for any leatherbound volume that surprises us by existing. We packed it. We don’t know yet what it is. We’ll find out together when we list it.

The rest of the run

We won’t inventory every order — the description on the video has the full list with timestamps if you want the rundown. The night also moved a lot of 25 vintage 35mm movie-theater trailer reels (going UPS Ground to New York, almost 22 lbs in the box), an I Love Lucy & Ethel “Job Switching” Pink Label Barbie packed without its outer box to save weight on the postage, an Encyclopedia of Cajun & Creole Cuisine 1983 first edition with what is unmistakably a coaster water stain on the cover, and the kind of long-tail items that make a 14-pack run feel like a category buffet — Roman-coin reversible necklace, Stanley nesting cookset, Bernat yarn skeins, a Cry Baby plush, a full case of Daily Dose leave-in conditioner.

By the end of the pack, Candice’s energy was depleted, Lonnie was tired, and we were both rooting for it to translate into being tired tomorrow — “because if we’re really tired tomorrow, that would mean we did good today.” That’s the Pack It calculus. The garage sales start at 7 AM Friday, and by then this video will already be edited.

Thanks for hanging out in the pack room with us. We’ll see y’all in the next one.