Saturday morning was supposed to be a wash. The night before brought heavy, heavy rain — the kind that makes a chunk of garage-sale folks pull the tents in, stay in bed, and try again next weekend. Shannondoah is one of the bigger neighborhood sales in Baton Rouge — Candice had 29 houses on the list — and the rain knocked a portion of them out. Sellers couldn’t set up early. A lot of shoppers got scared off. We were home by noon with a truck of stuff we didn’t expect to come home with.

The headline of the day was a $30 cardboard box that Candice spotted sitting on the ground. I missed it because — as she pointed out, multiple times, on camera — I still don’t look down enough.

This post walks through what we paid for the haul, the wins, the swings-and-misses, the $5 mystery box gamble, and the buy of the day: a Pioneer DJ controller, a pair of PreSonus speakers, and a sealed pair of Pioneer headphones that comp out to about $375 between the three of them.

The setup

29 houses on the route, a Saturday after a rainstorm, a neighborhood that normally goes hard. Maybe half the sellers participated. The ones that did had their stuff out — but the foot traffic was thin. That’s the kind of day where a $30 box that probably should’ve been gone by 8:30 is still sitting on the driveway at 11.

Candice put it best on camera: she hit a home run, and I hit a bunt or a pop-out at first base. We’ll get my swing-and-miss out of the way first.

The bunt: 40-ish Wii games and Skylanders ($30)

[1:20] Bin of around 40 Wii games + a bag of Skylanders + the portal — $30. I overpaid. I’ll just say it. When I first looked at the bin I saw $1 stickers, and the math at a dollar a whack is fine. What I didn’t notice until I got it home was that a lot of them had 50¢ stickers underneath. My fault for not pulling more out of the box at the table.

Plan: lot them up. Probably one big lot, maybe split into two or three by genre — the hunting and sports stuff (Backyard Football, Buck Hunter, Big Game Hunter, Hunting Extravaganza, Wheel of Fortune) bundles cleanly. The Skylanders portal plus the figures and the card-things is its own thing. I’d rather take a single $40 lot sale than fight with 40 individual $1 listings.

Candice’s home run: 26 Lolita hand-painted glasses

[6:10] 26 Lolita hand-painted glasses — Halloween-heavy. Martini glasses and the taller wine-style ones, all hand-painted, several on Halloween themes. That Witch Is Back is a real one we pulled out of the lot. We comped one of the Halloween designs at $40 on eBay. Not every glass in the lot is going to hit $40, but if even half of them average $15–20 sold, this is the buy that redeemed my Wii bin. Candice spotted these on a back shelf and went straight for them — the kind of move where she’s already pricing it in her head before she’s halfway across the driveway.

Martin Dingmans, Fitvilles, $2 Birkenstocks

[9:00] Martin Dingman shoes — check the inside before you list them. Quality brand, solid sourcing pickup. The catch — and this one made us laugh — is somebody had glued cotton padding inside one of them. Just stuck there. Probably so they’d fit a smaller foot. We’ll see if it comes out clean.

[10:21] Fitvilles plus a pair of $2 Birkenstocks. The Birks were the sleeper buy of the shoe pile. At $2 a pair, even the worn ones are net-positive after fees.

The signed hockey helmet (with COA)

[11:31] Signed hockey helmet — COA in the bag. I almost left it. Almost. The “is this real” doubt was loud, and to be honest we still aren’t 100% sure. The COA is there, the signature reads legit at a glance, but I’d rather research before I list. If the COA checks out, we’ll know what we’re working with. If it doesn’t, it’s still a hockey helmet for whatever a hockey helmet is worth without the autograph.

The $5 mystery figure box: Fistful of Power + Yu-Gi-Oh

[15:35] Mystery figure box, $5. I’d rather do this than buy a scratch-off ticket. We’ve already comped most of the contents on camera — the little fist with a number stamped on the bottom of the figure means it’s a Fistful of Power PVC, and a recent eBay sold listing moved 55 of them as a lot for $35. There’s also a Yu-Gi-Oh figure in there that comps around $7 by itself. Even at the worst case where we bundle the whole box and call it a day, we’re up — and the box has at least one larger figure that could change the math.

The buy of the day: a $30 DJ box

[19:30] Pioneer DJ controller, PreSonus Eris speakers, sealed red Pioneer headphones — $30 for the whole box.

This is the one. Candice spotted it on the ground at one of the houses. The sellers — probably early thirties, savvy enough to have looked it up — had it priced at $30 the entire morning, and nobody had grabbed it. When we said yes, they cheered. Which honestly should’ve been a hint that they’d been waiting on it.

What’s actually in the box:

• Pioneer DJ controller. Comps pulled up on the spot at 21:57 showed sold listings in the $150 range. USB-powered, RCA outs, manuals in the box.
• PreSonus Eris speakers. The photo on the outer box was for one model; the actual pair inside was a different (better) PreSonus set. 22:22 is the moment we figured that out.
• Sealed red Pioneer headphones. Brand new in the package. Headphone comps at 24:15 put a real number on those too.

Add the three together at 25:46 and we land around $375 out of a $30 buy. That’s the kind of number where Candice and I look at each other and ask the same question the sellers were probably asking themselves: why was this still here?

The lesson

27:42 is the timestamp where we sit with it. The honest answer is probably “the rain scared off the volume of shoppers who’d have grabbed it before 9 a.m.” The funnier answer is the one Candice landed on: maybe it was a bunch of seven-footers who don’t look down. Either way — look down at garage sales. That was a $30 box on the ground that a lot of folks walked past.

Side note: if we keep the controller for a week before listing, Candice has been mulling DJ Rainbow as a stage name, depending on what color her hair is at the moment. We will see.

References

• Lolita hand-painted glassware on eBay sold filter — That Witch Is Back and similar Halloween designs.
• Pioneer DJ controller sold listings — pull comps before you price.
• Fistful of Power PVC figures — bulk lots move on eBay; the recent sold of 55 at ~$35 is the comp we worked off of.
• Martin Dingman — quality men’s shoe brand, worth pulling at thrift if the size is right (and the inside hasn’t been glue-padded).