Three Things I’d Never Leave Behind When Thrifting
I genuinely used to think spending a Saturday at the tip sounded like a terrible idea.
My dad and his partner had been doing it for years. People I worked with would talk about things they’d found there with an excitement I never really understood. As far as I was concerned, someone had already decided they didn’t want this stuff. I couldn’t quite see why everybody else was so pleased to find it.
Then I went to my friend Jess’s house. In her kitchen were two long shelves filled with the kind of things I would have assumed came from beautiful little homewares stores. Old ceramics, strange little vessels, plants trailing out of things that probably had an entirely different purpose in another life. Nothing matched, which somehow made the whole thing better. I asked where she had found it all.
Vinnies.
This was mildly irritating information to receive, because apparently I had been walking past this stuff for years.
I made her tell me every secondhand shop she liked in Canberra and eventually went into my local Vinnies with completely different eyes. Suddenly there were shelves and shelves of ceramics I had never properly noticed before. Then came the children’s books, including perfectly good ones that looked like they had barely been opened. Not long after that I found myself at the tip with Dad, which would have been an almost unthinkable recreational activity for me not that long before.
At some point I became the person trying to convince everybody else to start thrifting.
Most of my friends responded to my new obsession with the kind of enthusiasm people use when they have absolutely no intention of joining you. I kept telling everyone they needed to come with me and, for the most part, nobody was particularly moved.
Sophie was the exception. I mentioned thrifting to her and she went straight to her local Vinnies. There was no easing into it. A few pieces became regular visits, regular visits became trolley loads, and before long the two of us were walking out with enough crystal and silverware to suggest we were furnishing a small hotel. A ridiculous amount of what now ends up on Good Grazd tables came from those trips. Real crystal, old silver, strange little serving pieces we absolutely did not need until we saw them and immediately decided we did.
The thing I love about thrifting now is that I almost never go in looking for something specific. You can’t really plan the good finds. Some days there is absolutely nothing. Other days you walk in just after somebody has put something on a shelf that you may genuinely never come across again.
Sophie had one of those moments at her local Vinnies. She asked at the counter whether they had any crystalware or silverware and was told they didn’t. Then someone came out from the back and said some crystal had just been dropped off and hadn’t even been priced yet. He thought it was around a hundred years old. She bought it, and the pieces are beautiful.
And I’ve learnt that you don’t always need to know exactly what you’re looking at either. I have confidently bought things I was sure were old or valuable and been completely wrong, then spent almost nothing on something I later discovered had been around for nearly two centuries. That uncertainty is half the fun.
These days, though, there are three parts of a secondhand shop I can no longer walk past without having a proper look.
1. Silverware
Give me the dirtiest piece of silver on the shelf.
Not actually dirty, obviously. Tarnished. The brown, almost black kind where half the shop has probably walked past it because it looks like it’s had a very long and difficult life.
That’s usually when I start looking closer.
If I can see beautiful detailing underneath the tarnish, engraving around an edge, an ornate handle, some tiny bit of workmanship that is still hanging on under all of it, I’m interested. Because you know what happens when you get it home, clean it properly and that detail starts appearing again.
It feels like watching the thing remember what it used to look like.
And then, because my brain apparently has nowhere more useful to go, I start wondering about who owned it. What table was it on? What was served in it? How many dinners did it sit through? What conversations happened around it while it was just quietly sitting there being a bowl?
I know that sounds slightly unhinged, but old things do that to me.
I also need to be very clear that I am not an antiques expert. I have bought what I thought was some incredible old silver piece, cleaned it and discovered I had essentially purchased somebody’s childhood sporting trophy. I’ve paid more for things because I assumed the price meant the person selling it knew something I didn’t, only to get home and realise that, no, apparently neither of us knew anything.
Then I’ve picked up something for next to nothing and discovered later that it was genuinely old.
There is no dignity in this process.
There is, however, one silver piece I still think about. It was an enormous pedestal bowl, the kind you could pile grapes into and let them spill over the sides like you live permanently inside a Dutch still-life painting. I was there by myself, with my baby strapped to my chest and my arms already full of random crystal bowls. I spent a ridiculous amount of time trying to work out how I could carry it as well, as though wanting it badly enough might somehow produce another pair of hands.
I left it.
I have never seen another one that big since.
This is one of the first rules thrifting teaches you: if you love something unusual and leave it behind, you need to be emotionally prepared to think about it for the rest of your life.
2. Crystal
Crystal is different because it usually doesn’t need rescuing. Half the time it is sitting there looking completely outrageous and nobody seems to care.
A proper piece has weight to it. You pick it up and immediately know you’re holding something. The cuts catch the light, it has that beautiful clear ring when you tap it, and when the sun hits it properly it throws light everywhere.
I have a crystal vase that does exactly that. I honestly don’t even know who made it. I just know that when sunlight hits the thing it sparkles like mad, it is ridiculously heavy and it looks beautiful with flowers in it.
And that is the part I can never quite get over. People will spend hundreds of dollars on a brand-new vase, while something made this beautifully is sitting at a tip or in an op shop for almost nothing because whoever owned it before has finished with it.
Crystal also gets me because you know so many of these pieces were once somebody’s good things.
The glasses that only came out when people came over. The decanter that lived in the cabinet. The serving bowl nobody was allowed to touch as a child. Then eventually a whole lifetime gets packed up and somebody’s precious crystal ends up on a Vinnies shelf.
Sophie and I once found a silver piece still sitting in its original box with the card attached. Whatever the story was, somebody had kept that thing carefully enough that the packaging survived with it. You don’t know if it was a wedding present, an anniversary gift or something somebody saved for years to buy. You’ll never know.
There is something strange and lovely about getting to be the next person who cares about it.
3. Ceramics, vases and anything with a good shape
This category is probably the least disciplined because sometimes I’m barely looking at what something is. I’m looking at what it could be.
A bowl can be an awful colour and still have an incredible shape. A vase can look completely dated but have the exact proportions people are currently paying hundreds of dollars for. A big old pot can be chipped, faded and covered in something questionable and I’m already thinking about what colour I’m going to paint it.
Big pots in particular are criminally expensive, so I have absolutely no problem buying an old one and giving it another life.
I was at the tip once going through terracotta pots and Sophie mentioned that she could just buy some from Bunnings. I flipped one over and underneath it was stamped Made in Rome.
Absolutely not.
That was no longer a random terracotta pot. In my head it immediately belonged to some old Italian woman who had lovingly grown herbs in it for forty years before it somehow ended up at the Canberra tip. Was any of that true? Almost certainly not. Did I care? Also no.
It was coming home.
That’s probably the biggest difference in the way I shop secondhand now. I don’t necessarily need something to already be beautiful. If the shape is right, I can see the next version of it.
I did the same thing with furniture during my last maternity leave. I would buy old pieces because I needed something creative to do, then paint them, change the handles and completely change what they looked like. There is a ridiculous amount of satisfaction in standing back afterwards and thinking, holy shit, that was the same ugly thing I dragged home.
Ceramics are also where the research rabbit holes happen. I rarely stand in the shop Googling everything. You eventually start noticing little things without really meaning to: the colour of an old ceramic body, the glaze, the way the base has aged, a maker’s mark that looks interesting.
Then you get home and start searching.
Sometimes you discover you have bought absolutely nothing of consequence. Other times the strange name stamped underneath turns out to belong to a recognised German potter and you’re suddenly sitting there wondering how the hell their work ended up in a suburban secondhand shop in Canberra.
That’s part of why I don’t think you need to know everything before you start thrifting.
You just need to look twice.
At the silver bowl that looks too far gone. The piece of crystal everybody else has mistaken for another glass vase. The ceramic bowl in a terrible colour with a shape you can’t stop looking at.
I’ve been completely wrong about things I was convinced were special, and accidentally right about things I bought purely because I liked them. I think that has actually made thrifting more fun, not less.
There is no catalogue telling you what you’re going to find that day. There is no second one sitting out the back if you change your mind. Some things are valuable. Some are not. Some have an incredible history you’ll manage to uncover, and some will remain a complete mystery.
And every now and then, you walk in at exactly the right time and find the thing somebody else left behind.
That’s the bit that keeps me going back.