“If I had to chart everything I’ve found that's been amazing and terrific,” McConnell says, “it’s been in the patio, in the garage or in the cellar.” He theorizes this is because when stuff is no longer practical to use every day, that's where it goes.

At an estate sale, head immediately to the patio, cellar and garage. Do not show up before a sale begins and lie your way into getting a preview of the merchandise.Ģ. This brings us to McConnell’s first tip.ġ. And some people would let them get away with that.” McConnell says occasionally these unscrupulous buyers would still come to the sale the next day. “Even though, apparently, they were grief stricken, they still wanted to look through the things. “They’d knock on the door and say, ‘I have a funeral the next day,’ and they wondered if they could just come and look through,” McConnell says. He tells me there were notorious shoppers who used to look for sales with published addresses and show up the night before. McConnell begins with a tale of treasure hunting taken to the extreme. After all those years in the trenches, McConnell has tips and secrets that even the greenest shopper can use to get the most bang for her buck, from estate sales to yard sales. For example, the day I visited, McConnell was preparing an auction of a large game taxidermy collection from a big game hunter in Edmonds. McConnell has given up his weekend warrior status to be the auction manager at Pacific Galleries in Seattle’s Sodo neighborhood. For 15 years, McConnell spent every weekend scouring estate sales, garage sales and yard sales, looking to win big by finding treasures to resell for profit. Hitting a garage sale or two might sound like a relaxing way to spend a weekend afternoon.īut for Mike McConnell sales of other people’s stuff promised an adrenaline rush akin to gambling.

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