I’ll be the first one to admit it, I’m a thrift store junky. Sounds like the name of a band doesn’t it? I have been a junky for years. Many people, I suppose wouldn’t lower themselves to shop at a thrift store, much less admit that they do. They should have a group for people like me. “My name is Jaz and I’m a thrift store junky.” Ok, all jesting aside. I don’t know where or when this started, it must have been when I got my first apartment and I was looking for stuff to decorate my place with. Back then I was a lowly bartender, living alone and on a very low budget.
Now the obsession has gone to other things, clothes, books and other miscellaneous “stuff” If you look hard enough you can find clothes that are brand new, someone bought and never wore and donated it. Or sometimes the clothes are practically brand new. The key to finding the good clothes is you have to look through miles of crappy stuff to find that one treasure. Another thing I do is check all the seams, make sure there are no holes or other problems with the item themselves. If one were to look in my closet you would find that a large majority of my clothes have come from thrift stores but you couldn’t tell to look at them. I only buy myself new things once in a great while.
Most of the time when I find myself buying clothes from a thrift store it’s because I have gone on a search for new books to replenish my extensive library with. I can’t even begin to put a number on the amount of books I have read over the years. There are over 200 books in my library now, and these are only my favorites, ones worth reading again and again. I keep about 25 books in my to be read stack and as I go through them they either get sold to a used book store I deal with, are put in the permanent stacks or are donated back.
Some of the other items that I have found over the years are neat, unusual looking vases. I also have this fetish for vases. Recently I was making a display of cattails and driftwood and I found a really cool, tall wicker basket vase that was just perfect for $7. It’s a display that looks like I bought it at a decorators shop for much more than the $7 and my energy to go out and collect driftwood and cattails. Another really cool item I found last year was an old metal trunk, probably circa WWI and that is now my hope chest.
There are other things too, hats, I’m a hat junky also. I may be a thrift store junky but over the years the cool things I have found have brought me years of enjoyment and not hurt my pocket book too badly at all. Ok, so I admit it, I’m a thrift store junky, but I’m a happy thrift store junky.
