So, I've been doing an ongoing purge for the past couple of months. As everyone knows we do estate and yard sales, I've been updating my clothes, etc... One of the things I did was go through the girl's playroom upstairs. When Jackson and Amy were here he mentioned he thought some of the toys were a little babyish for them which made me realize that might be my next target. I went through the toy basket and got rid of a lot, dolls they didn't play with, broken and missing parts, a couple of Barbies that looked like 3 miles of bad road, you get the gist. I probably have to do another sorting but I got rid of a couple of bags.
And yes, the girls have a small playroom - we take them for long stretches ( over Christmas it was over 2 weeks) and when they're here they are here. They don't go to school or daycare so we need things for them to do. We have an art tote which is full of paints, projects and shrinky dinks - when Kim cleaned out her loft she gave us a ton of fun stuff. The TV has a wireless game controller upstairs, there's the swings, the dogs - but here in Oregon it rains. A lot. When they were here over Christmas it rained almost every single day so the well stocked playroom was a blessing! But now it looked a little bare. I started going on FB marketplace - you can get some crazy deals on used toys. And you can often buy entire collections when kids outgrow it. Which is what I found. The girls love the fashion dolls now and the LOL surprise dolls are pretty popular.
I had come across a pretty good collection but they wanted $120 - too much for me! But I saved it and saw it down to $100. I texted the guy and offered $75 which he accepted right away and mentioned the collection was a "little bit more" than shown. We met in a store parking lot, me in my little white Volt, him in his fairly new giant white truck. I gave him the money and opened my hatchback and he brought the house first - WAY bigger than I t hought. I put down my seats. He had put the toys and accessories in giant black yard bags, one, two, a smaller bag full of dolls, three....my car was stuffed. I started to thank him and he pulled out a FOURTH bag - he must've seen my panic because he peeked over my shoulder and said "I'll bet it'll fit in the front seat if we move that other bag!", stuffed it in my car and ran before I could change my mind. The drive home was interesting, I could barely see out my side window. I hauled it in the house and piled it in the kitchen.
He had said his daughter had been a big collector and outgrown it - there is easily a thousand dollars of these toys, there are sets that were never opened! It's all really clean and wow, the house, the camper, the jeep, the party car, the container play skate park, bags of dolls, the beauty salon - I have a feeling we are going to have some pretty excited little girls. I have to sort it out, this kid saved EVERYTHING and I had to go on some websites to see how the camper worked (retail is $134!) but overall I did good. Barbie will have some new neighbors and the house the bears own will be moved to the back of the neighborhood. The nice thing about buying this stuff used is you get the entire collection all at once and when they outgrow it I'll simply pack it up and donate it to Goodwill so it will get played with again. I can't wait for them to see it
