Yard sale season is coming. Here's how one vintage hunter makes the most of it

It's starting to feel like summer, and for many in Windsor-Essex that means one thing: yard sale season is here. 

Tawnie Clarke is the co-owner of Racks and Ruins, a Windsor-based vintage clothing curator. She says it'll soon be time to get out and about in the early morning on weekends, roving the county looking for the best yard sales. 

Yeah, that's like the plan for the day, date night, we're going yard sale-ing," Clarke said. "Get a coffee in the morning and you'll catch me in the county going all those yard sales."

While it's always great to get a deal and Clarke says she will bargain with sellers, sometimes she lets owners know when they have something worth far more than the few dollars they're asking. 

"We actually had a man that had an old Harley-Davidson tee that was worth probably $100 to $200, just by the the age and the year of the piece," Clarke said. "He was trying to sell it for $10 or $15 and we didn't want to buy it off of him just because we knew how much it was. So we we told him to do his research and and then he did and he kind of thanked us ... because obviously now he's making more money off of it."

In days past, you used to find yard sales in the newspaper classifieds. Now, Clarke says she checks out community Facebook groups for postings about yard sales happening in the region. 

Clarke says she finds some of the best yard sales — at least for what she's looking for, vintage band t-shirts and some mid-century modern furniture — are in Essex County. And, she says she loves a piece with a story. 

"More or less, every time you go yard sale-ing it, people are just getting rid of their junk. But the odd time that you do actually communicate with the person hosting the yard sale, they're the ones that are getting rid of something that they originally loved and were interested in.

"If you open up that door … they all have stories, right?"