Our storage unit was an untidy mess so when the storage company had a collective garage sale we decided to join up to see if we could get rid of some of our junk.
The sale started at 9 am but we were advised they would be open at 7 am. I thought this was a bit early so we left home at 7 and got there at about 7:30. This is a disgusting time of the day to be moving about. We should have been sitting comfortably at home sipping tea and lamenting the fact that our investments had slipped again.
However, the table was put up and all our junk was laid out for people to look at and ignore. Then it was time to sit in the cold breeze and wait for the first sucker customer to come by. We didn’t do too badly, the object wasn’t so much to make money as to clear space in the lock-up.
A lot of people came at 9 am but after an hour it started to slow down. I suggested to Rosalie that we wait until 11 and then if it hadn’t got better to call it a day. Eleven came around and seeing as neither of us had wanted to be there in the first place, we had a good excuse to get back to our tea.
I pulled the car in and started to load. Just as we were finishing a whole crowd of people arrived so we missed out on yet more sales. Oh well! there was always the tea.
The side story to this is, that while I lived in England I used to collect coins. I was a numismatist, ooh how posh! Actually, I was very amateur as I didn’t have the money to do it seriously.
Anyway, while cleaning the locker I came across a hoard of my coins for the umpteenth time and decided that after 55 years I couldn’t ignore them any longer and would have to do something about them, so we took them home. But before I could hide them again Rosalie caught me and said that I had to do something with them.
There were dozens of them so where to start? I opened up a decimal set and found out that it was worth about $100 and I had three of them. Now I started to take an interest.
The first thing to do was to check each one to see if it had any value and if not toss it aside for further processing. Some are Canadian, some are USA but the majority are from the UK.
1972 Proof decimal set.
A lot of the UK coins are pre-decimal and I found it a little odd to be throwing money away that I used to work so hard for as a kid. Most of the coins were worthless but some, after 55 years, had added some value.
The good thing is that even if the decimal coins have no collectable value, we can always spend them if we ever go back to England. The Canadian and US dollars can still be spent so not all is lost.
So my quest for that very rare coin continues, in the meantime, I will content myself with trying to sell some on eBay for a few bucks; wish me luck.
Good idea Chris you never know what you have till you can find today value !