As most of my handful of readers know, the husband unit and I go weekly to yard sales, buying odds and ends for the house and for resale. Over the course of the past three years or so we’ve built up a staggering collection of vintage Pyrex bowls and other goodies. We finally agreed it’s time to cull out the items I don’t want to keep – which, believe it or not, is plenty of them.
I belong to a couple of different Pyrex groups, where selling and trading is the rule of thumb. I’ve learned which goes for what and which patterns and colors are rare or popular. I know which ones I want to keep for the sake of nostalgia, and which because they are valuable. Some of them can be valuable and I still don’t like them, so they’re going! Most of the pieces are mid-century, some later. And not all are Pyrex. I also have some iridescent and painted Fire King pieces, and a set of mid-century teak bowls that are gorgeous – the wood positively glows. (Pictures of those below.)
That picture with the mushrooms? The pattern is called Forest Fancies, and the nesting bowls are size 402 and 403. It’s a fairly popular pattern but doesn’t do a thing for me so it’s outta here.
It’s funny – we ladies meet in parking lots to trade our booty. It’s like some clandestine drug deal. “Psst – you have the bowl?” Then money and bowl changes hands.
I did a deal for this little casserole today, and the buyer was tickled pink to get it.
The lid alone was frankly worth what I asked for the set ($7). If you run across any Pyrex lids at garage sales or flea markets, scoop those babies up and sell them on eBay, especially the ones that are flat versions like this one. Even the clear ones sell for $7-8 apiece, and the painted ones go for more.
A single nice solid red 402 (the numbers are marked on the bottom) nesting bowl goes for $15 and up. Pink and turquoise pieces in good condition command premium prices. A set of four solid pink nesting bowls, in good shape, goes for $250 and up.
This little beauty (not mine, unfortunately) recently sold for over $1000 on eBay. It wasn’t this specific one, which has flaws, but a flawless sister.
This poor little thing is only up to a little over $200, flaws and all.
Mind you, we don’t command that kind of money from most of what we get for resale, but for example the little casserole we sold for $7 – I think we paid $1-2 for it. Most of what we have, we buy for $2-3 or less. I did pay $9 for my pink 404 bowl, a 4-quart beauty. It would easily fetch more than 5 times that on eBay if I were to sell it. Which I’m not, not unless things get desperate.
This is a personal favorite but we simply don’t have the space to keep them. They’re the mid-century teak set I mentioned before.
These are going up on eBay. I don’t love the venue but frankly if I’m selling stuff other than locally, it’s the only venue worth the trouble. I created a store on vangoe.com and literally only had one view on one item. I didn’t close the store outright but probably will in the near future. They’ve got technical issues, but the biggest issue is the fact that nobody knows about it and the owners won’t promote it.
Oh well. I tried talking to the person who sunk tens of thousands of dollars into it. He blew off my advice. Que será, será.
Life is being… life. We have another new granddaughter, this one a strawberry blond. Both our other granddaughters are brown babies so for some reason I pictured this one with dark hair. Doesn’t matter – we were going to love her no matter what.
The businesses are still bubbling, even if they’re cooking much slower than I might have liked. We’ve got a local low-power radio station who’s offered to help us with some of the local projects, and the International one will get there sooner or later. It’s all funding, which considering the volatile political climate these days is tough to come by. My partner wants me to find angel investors, which I like in theory. In practice, it’s still a tough market and when you have an angel investor they aren’t always angels.
My body decided to ignore the fact that it’s warming up. I’ve been on near-total shutdown for a good chunk of the past few weeks. Still waiting on the SSD outcome, which of course I already knew would take a while at best. I’m still a believer that things will work out and we’ll be fine. We’re doing all we can and probably more than we should, and the rest is up to God and the Universe.