Hello there. Long time no blog. I know it's me. I am seriously slacking here in this space. If only it was just as easy to blog from my phone as it is to instagram! Ah wells. Hopefully a few more posts and I will get back to it.
One of many things I've been doing lately has been collecting records. Late last year, Mitch and I had talked about starting one up. I have always wanted to start one and he has fond memories of his dad's record collection growing up. So for Christmas we bought ourselves this lovely old school looking radio/record/cd/cassette player. We also purchased a few records from a record store in LA.
We bought a few records online and I picked up a box of records from my parents' garage and slowly our collection grew to fill one cube of our Expedit shelf.
Then we started going to various Good Will and Salvation Army stores in Orange and LA counties. After going to over a dozen stores, we found that the Salvation Army stores in Long Beach and Norwalk has the best selections. Our parameters for buying records were pretty loose, as long as we heard of someone or some song on the record, and the record was is good shape, we bought it. Of course our collection quickly grew.
Then we found out about some estate sales in our weekly Penny Saver. The first Estate Sale we went to was in Newport Beach. By the time we got there, there were only a few 78s and one 45 of the Chipmunks Christmas Song. That's when we learned that we need to go early. Our next estate sale was in San Juan Capistrano. We bought a few good things there and thought that since we were in the area, we would go down to
The Old Barn Antique Mall. Here is our loot from that haul:
Our largest garage/estate sale haul was from Laguna Beach. We scored over 150 records for $300. Some notables included a Bruce Springsteen box set, several Robert Plants, Toto, and Joe Walsh.
We also hit up a few local record stores and picked up a bunch of records in their bargain bins.
Creme Tangerine is a cool spot and
Port of Sound has a large selection and a massive bargain bin. They also have the plastic covers and paper sleeves for protecting all our finds.
With all those records we thought we hit the jackpot, until one day this happened:
Hidden away in the back corner of the Salvation Army in Norwalk were these two records. Up until this point, we had not seen a single Beatles or Rolling Stones record in any garage sale or thrift store. We did see a Meet the Beatles at an Antique store that looked like someone had used it to slide down their driveway and the cover looked like it had been in the washing machine. She was trying to sell that to us for $20! These two records we found at the Salvation Army were in good condition and even played well.
With our growing collection, we filled up one Expedite shelf pretty quickly and ended up getting another shelf so we didn't have boxes in our living room. We also bought a new turn table for $10 at a garage sale and hooked it up to my stereo. Our old record player was recently sold on Craigslist.
Speaking of Craigslist, we also made some pretty good deals on there. We were able to get a nice lot of Elvis for $50 and we scored the White Album and Help in another lot for $15. One of our best and last of the HUGE lot purchases was a over 300 records for $150. It was from a DJ who was moving and wanted to get rid of a bunch of stuff. There was a nice mix of music and after storing through it, we ended up keeping the Rap, R&B, Reggae, and about half of the rock and country music. We plan on selling the other half, along with duplicates and other records that we bought that we didn't end up liking.
All this record collecting brought me to tears at one point. It's an expensive hobby if you aren't careful or selective about your purchases. We found that while record stores do have the selection and quality but the prices can be higher in some cases. I was surprised that stuff from the Beatles is readily available and are not as pricy as I would have thought. We were told its because the market is saturated with Beatles records, and that with a little looking, you could find some good deals (like our Rubber Soul, White Album, and Help finds above)
Mitch and I made the decision to stop buying records until we have listened to every record we currently own, or until we find a house to store our collect. That lasted about a week. We still have made visits to the Salvation Army where we found these Led Zeppelin Records for less than $3.00 each...
Last Sunday we went to the Antique Market at the Great Park and brought home another 30 records. So much for our record buying freeze. We are definitely much more selective, but we still have not stopped.
No more fancy declarations of no more records. We have two Expedit shelves almost full of records, along with three other boxes and a crate tucked away in various parts of our living room. We have to rather large and full boxes on our balcony that are filled with records to be sold. I'm hoping we can get a nice amount for those and recoup some of our costs. Who thinks that we are just going to use that money to buy even more records? *sigh*
