Boxes, Bundling, and Bad Intentions

Last Saturday morning, Doug and I headed out at 6:15 for a garage sale advertised as having a lot of vintage tools and a large collection of vintage fruit boxes.

Here is the back of our truck when we got home, but making these purchases wasn't exactly smooth sailing.

It was definitely a "guy" kind of sale--when we got there at 6:30, the early birds were out in force, but I was the only woman.  Guys were already loading mysterious machinery and equipment into pickup trucks, but I zeroed in on the boxes because of the beautiful labels on them.

Nothing was priced, and the young man in charge seemed more interested in telling stories about the stuff than he was in selling it.

I asked him about the fruit boxes.

"Oh this is just part of the collection," he said.  "There's more over at my house across the street. We have more than a hundred of them and we're selling them as a set."

Good luck with that.

Then he weakened just a bit.

"If you see some you like, ask me and maybe we can work something out. But it wasn't my intention to split up the lot."

I wasn't too concerned about his intentions; I just wanted to buy a couple of boxes.

So I wandered around trying to decide which ones I wanted based on the labels. I chose two, one of which turned out to be perfect for storing food for our cat, Casey:

and the other for storing my collection of British Country Living magazines (I didn't think Casey would appreciate having her food stored in a box with a picture of a dog on it):

 I also picked up a little cardboard cheese box that was filled with vintage marbles:

 as well as three hardback books.

Doug added to the pile three metal storage boxes for hardware.

We decided to be like Frank from Pickers and go for a "bundle" deal.  We settled on offering the guy $40 for the lot.

In the meantime, however, Doug spotted a really cool wooden box that had once held black powder pellets but now contained a vintage scale and set of weights.

Doug wanted only the box:

which had a really cool insert to keep the explosives in place during shipping:

The guy was adamant about selling the box and the contents together, and he wanted $50. Doug pointed out that there was no connection between the powder box and the weights, and he finally wore the guy down.

"OK, you can have the box for $20. But it wasn't my intention to sell them separately."

We paid him quickly before he could change his mind and then helped him "stage" the scale and the weights so people would notice them in the driveway. He probably ended up getting $50 just from the scale.

He also had the satisfaction of having the last word about his intentions. But that's OK because we had the boxes.