tropit

NapaJohn, I believe that I'm in the, "Goodwill Redwood Empire," too, being from Mendocino County. I've heard about the Santa Rosa store, but I didn't know it was a warehouse center. I'll have to check it out the next time I go to the city.

~ Cindy

Mrs. SewNSew

Napajohn, Does Santa Rosa ever have anything good? I'm in Ukiah and the store here has machines sometimes but prices then high. A machine in cabinet will probably be 30.00, any black Singer 50.00 (I've only seen 2 in the last year). I NEVER find attachments there. I am beginning to suspect them send them all to Oregon!

Mrs. SewNSew

Nice to hear. I bought a machine from Sacramento and Oy! The packing..not so good.

Sewnoma

I live in Santa Rosa - the Goodwills here never have any sewing machines at all - I haven't seen one there in the last couple years that I've been looking and I probably go thrift storing a couple times a month. I think they pull all their good stuff for the online site. They have an outlet store here but that's a collecting place for all the stuff they couldn't sell elsewhere; never seen any sewing machines there. It's a weird place to shop, everything is just dumped helter-skelter into bins and sold by the pound. They might have their online stuff stored somewhere on that premises (it's a big building) but it's not open to the public to browse as far as I can tell.

I found a cool machine on Craig's List, from a local St. Vincent de Paul thrift shop, I went to go see it in person and it wasn't there; they had it somewhere else even though the ad listed the local shop. So Goodwill isn't the only thrift shop figuring out that there are geeks who will pay a lot for old machines and setting them aside for special attention!

My best finds here in SRosa have been from other, smaller thrift shops. I like the Sutter hospice shops, that's where I found my badass steel Kenmore for $15 and I've also picked up attachments there pretty cheap. I bought my rusty & beat up Singer 15 at "Pick of the Litter" thrift for $20, and I bought my nearly-pristine 99K from Mission Thrift for $45 - not a fantastic deal but I couldn't leave her there! But I've also seen not-so-great machines in beat up cabinets in those stores and they usually want around $80-100 for those; if not more. Anything truly nice looking or that looks too "antique" is going to be a couple hundred or more. And most of them consider a machine in a cabinet to be "furniture" and therefore excluded from their color tag sales. (harumph)

I'm tellin' ya'....they're onto us!

tropit

I was going to ask you were you're from. I'm over near the Anderson Valley. I go to Ukiah once a week to shop at the Co-op. I frequent the Hospice Thrift store and the GW, but rarely find anything amazing. I did find a Rowenta iron at GW for $5, But, other than that, it's been pretty disappointing. I've been meaning to stop at the GW in Cloverdale.

~ Cindy

Quincunx

I think everyone should go to the GW outlet at least once. You are forced to learn about the other end of the second hand clothes market and what it is like when the old clothes are bundled and sold to third world countries' markets. (A Nigerian nickname for an old clothes shop is 'bend-over boutique'. I love it. I bend over at a lot of garage sales.) One time out of five there was a '70s Kenmore in a thin cabinet. Since it sort of worked and had its bobbin and case I left it there for someone who needs to mend and is not learning how to fix machines.

I learned to look in the blighted areas of south Sacramento where people have storefronts selling estate sale leftovers as second hand goods. Same time period and general goods as the Goodwills but the small business guys at least have garage sale prices.

Sewnoma

I have family in Sac and was out there a few weekends ago. We're all "junkers" so I spent some time pawing through thrift shops with my kin and I definitely counted up a lot more machines there than I find around here. All more modern "plastic fantastics" though, nothing really vintage. Nothing that even remotely tempted me. (Which is possibly for the best...)

That's an interesting comment about storefronts in South Sac. I'll have to go for a cruise out that way next time I'm in town!

Thankfully I enjoy the hunt almost as much as I enjoy finding treasure. I love thrift shops, second-hand shops, charity shops, garage sales, estate sales... You just never know what you'll find!

Borletti Milano

Funny, but I've lived partly in Portland during the last year and a half, and I think that the best sewing machines seem to come from the Tacoma WA Goodwill - which refuses to ship sewing machines. A friend of mine went ahead and, against her husbands advice, bought a machine from the Tacoma store so went there to pick it up. She said the neighborhood was VERY dicey, and she will never do that again.

I have bought several SM's from Goodwill online that came from the Hillsboro Goodwill outlet. It's pretty depressing - you really see all types there, I suspect like most thrift stores, but you do see a lot of folks who are obviously struggling and are there buying clothes for their kids.

That said, one weekend I went there to pick up an excellent vintage Viking 1030 which I won in an auction. At the Hillsboro Outlet store the merchandise bought through Goodwill Online is picked up through a separate entrance of the huge warehouse. After I picked up my Viking I put it in the car and, on a whim, decided to look for anything interesting in the main outlet. The Outlet is sort of post-apocalyptic...they wheel out huge bins of merchandise that hadn't sold in the other regional stores, and people buy them by the pound.

So I walked into the store and the first bin I get to I see a Singer grasscloth-covered sewing machine case. My heart started to race - I love those old cases, so I hustled over and was saw that the case was marked $20. I thought to myself that that seems like a decent price, then pulled the case out of the bin (surrounded by broken weed trimmers, liking cabinets and home appliances) and it was a little too heavy. Sure enough - inside the case was a beautiful mocha Singer 301A longbed, a Singer Zigzagger and all four cams and instructions, the original 301A accessory box with all the presser feet etc, original beige foot controller and machine instruction manual. I thought I'd hit the lottery. I quietly closed up the case, walked to the register, paid and hauled out of there, thinking that at any second a voice would boom over the public address system "Attention shopper with the Singer 301A - that machine was misplaced...we should have asked way more..."

The most amazing thing to me was that that machine ended up at the outlet in the giant bins full of junk because it DIDN'T SELL at a retail store? Where is this store where pristine 301As don't sell??

Brian

Rodney

The grass is always greener. I bought a couple machines from the Tacoma goodwill but I always seem to find good machines in Indiana and Tennessee. Denver gets it's share of good ones too. The Tacoma neighborhood isn't nearly as scary as it was about 15 years ago.
Rodney

tropit

Brian, I'm totally envious of that 301A find.

I have always been a "Garage Sailor," and almost everything in my house is from a garage/yard sale, estate sale, or EBAY. I used to live in Santa Barbara county, which is a GS paradise. Those people only want the newest and best and sell, or donate perfectly good items that are now passe'. Now that I live up here in the boonies, I don't do the sales anymore and I miss them. People around here live in the hills and woods and it's just too impractical to go to sales. Plus, they are far more sensible (like myself) than the crowd down south. They just don't get rid of something unless it's pretty worn out. My son lives in Berkeley and he's furnished his whole apartment with the discards left on the curb by students moving out. Nice stuff too...leather couch and chair, desks, tables, etc. You'd never know he found it on the street.

~ Cindy