"We have to be ready. We've got to be up early. We've got to be over at Nanna's at, like, 6:30 (a.m.)."
Scenes from the Great Glebe Garage Sale, where second-hand finds come with a backstory.
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A neighbourhood resident for 39 years, Barbara Coyle watched her own kids embrace the thrill of commerce at the Great Glebe Garage Sale decades ago.
Standing beside his mother at his Powell Avenue family home on Saturday, adult son David Coyle vividly remembered selling his G.I. Joe playset, while Barbara used to bake cookies for his younger brother, who would sell them for a quarter and then run inside, confronted with such thrilling challenges as: “They want a dozen. What am I going to do?”
This year, Barbara got to watch her kid’s kids bring in the buyers, with lemonade and assorted baked goods served up for minimum 50-cent donations.
“I knew that Rice Krispie squares and chocolate chip cookies are crowd pleasers,” 12-year-old James Dunkley Coyle explained. He and his sibling and cousins came up with their food-and-drink vending plan themselves, buoyed by the success of another garage sale-bake sale, and decided that half of the profits would go to the Ottawa Food Bank.
“Because we’re making money, I feel like some of it should go to people who actually need it,” Dunkley Coyle reasoned. The rest of his share will go towards saving for an Xbox console.
David Coyle said Friday evening, the night before the garage sale, had been something like Christmas Eve for the kids in his house. “We have to be ready. We’ve got to be up early. We’ve got to be over at Nanna’s at, like, 6:30 (a.m.).”
Their goodies-covered table was one of countless set up across the Glebe in the latest edition of an annual event that appeals to the nostalgic, the thrifty, the enterpreneneurial, and the sustainability-minded.
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Most of the wares Hester Whatman was selling Saturday were trash.
Other people’s trash, that is.
On bi-weekly garbage nights, in and around the Glebe, Whatman will grab items from the curbside that it pains her to imagine in a landfill. Plastic is a particular trigger, hence the $3 brightly-coloured garbage containers and the set of spin mop buckets she was selling Saturday. “I know that’s not going to biodegrade anytime soon,” Whatman said.
The typical destination for her finds is a neighbourhood buy-nothing Facebook group. There she found a new way of connecting with people in all corners of her neighbourhood of 23 years, especially welcome during the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as new homes for recovered items. Lamps, for instance, she’ll make small fixes to herself before giving them away, or offer them to someone with rehabbing rehabbing skills she doesn’t have at this point. (She’s learning as she goes.)
“Some days I get out there, I’m like a bat out of hell: I’ve got to save the world. I’ve got to pick up everything in my little Subaru.”
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Eric Thomas has been the steward of a pair of wooden swords for years, across a series of moves from New Brunswick to Nova Scotia to Ottawa.
Through it all, he was never sure what, exactly, they were. But they were freely offered up by a landlord after a previous tenant left them behind, “were so cool,” and he thought they might have value or a use someday.
Ultimately, they became a curbside deal that Todd Tuttle could identify and couldn’t pass up: $10 for the pair of kendo canes, which, he said, one might buy for $130 or $140 apiece, depending on the maker.
Tuttle has been doing martial arts since he was 18, a four-decade passion that started with aikido and Goju-Ryu karate and today has him working on his fourth degree in jiu-jitsu.
“I’ve seen how it changes other people’s lives. It’s changed my life,” he said. “Made me a calmer person, made me able to deal with stress a little bit better.”
However, he doesn’t actually do kendo and doesn’t think he will use his new acquisitions himself. But he has a collection of martial arts weapons and, like their former owner, also thinks their value could be realized someday. “I have a lot of friends who do martial arts all around the world. So it’s quite possible, if I mentioned this to one of them, they would be like, ‘Hey, I’ll buy this from you.'”
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It was a disappointment that Nicole Sullivan chalked up to being unable to appeal to the bargain-hunters.
At her sister’s house near the western end of Powell Avenue, away from the heart of the action, but where plenty of people found parking, Sullivan had laid out an array of handmade creations: finger puppets, fabric elephants she stuffed and sewed, embroidered pillows for kids to leave lost teeth in for tooth fairy visits. One of the latter was the only thing that sold, priced at $40. It was sewn together, featuring cross-stitch and hand embroidery — time-consuming and painstaking work, but something Sullivan thoroughly enjoys.
It’s in the family tradition. Her mother sewed all their clothes growing up, her grandmother taught her embroidery as a girl, and her sister is a seamstress.
“I just find it really relaxing,” said Sullivan, 69. “And, probably because my grandma taught me so long ago, it’s a warm feeling.”
She and her sister have a business name in mind — Sully Sisters Sewing — and have been thinking about launching a digital presence.
“We were going to go on to Facebook, but now Facebook has got so many new rules. I’m not sure what we’re going to do yet, but I want them online, where people can see them.”