On Sunday, I headed to a couple of my favorite thrift stores. I was looking for a carpet steamer, which I didn’t find (there’s always next time – I know I’ll find one soon). But I did find one of these. For six dollars. We had been on the lookout for a new keyboard for our son, although I had never seen anything quite like this one. I didn’t know what the pipes sticking up the back were, and the whole thing looks like it’s made of PVC pipes (turns out that’s a bit part of the Blue Man Group’s show, which I didn’t know until my husband showed me YouTube videos of them performing). In the store, I didn’t know if it was broken or if the batteries were dead, but I figured for six dollars it was worth a chance.
As soon as we replaced the batteries, it came to life. And it is an amazing toy. Those pipes sticking up behind the keyboard are sensors, and all you have to do is wave your hand over them and they play amazing music – about 100 different kinds of music, depending on what setting you have it on. You can make fantastic combinations of sounds, just by waving your hands in a certain order. There’s even a place to plug an MP3 player into the keyboard.
Just another example of how you never know what you’ll find when you step into a thrift store. I didn’t find what I was looking for, but I stumbled across an amazing keyboard, and it was a fraction of what it would have cost new.
In other great thrift store news, my mother found a Rainbow vacuum last month for $20. It works perfectly, and she loves it. That is definitely up there in the top thrift store finds of all time!
And now that spring is coming to the northern hemisphere, yard sale season is on its way. I’m planning to shop at yard sales this year for clothes for our son. The thrift stores where I shop sell baby clothes for 99 cents, but they increase the price into the $2 – $4 range for clothes in toddler and kid sizes, and I know I can get better deals at yard sales. Looking forward to some good scavenger hunt Saturday mornings!
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