Our Goodwills are Insane

Our Goodwills are insane. Here in the Pacific Northwest, people give away some of the most amazing things. We're not sure if it is a byproduct of the laid-back pace of the world in the Northwest, or if people here just don't know about stuff like we do.

We go to Goodwills everwhere when we travel. So far we have explored New England, California, Colorado, New Jersey, Washington and Oregon. The best Goodwills are in Washington and Oregon, and of those Goodwills, our favorite one is right here in Portland.

We call it "Mill & Grand" because it's at the corner of Mill & Grand. It's what Goodwill calls a "Superstore" and super it is. We find treasures almost every time we go there. And we've found a lot of valuable things, such as an Asian painted screen worth over $1000 for $20.

We always look at the home goods, tchotchkes, wood, metal, glass, ceramics, and framed art. Sometimes we find textiles, such as the 1970s quilt that we recently sold to the Bowers Museum of Santa Ana, Calif., for its soon-to-open exhibition of quilts.

The place is a goldmine. We think it is because the store is downtown, in a densely populated area that is also rather transient. During the pandemic years, a lot of stuff showed up at that Goodwill. We did not want to be morbid about the situation, but every now and then we wondered whose stuff we were finding.

We found an original Geoffrey Pagen ceramic art disc wall piece with a landscape design, pictured at top, for a song. We found a pair of rare, Hippie and Flower Child bourbon decanters for $6.99 each, and sold the pair for over $400.

This week we saw a giant Satsuma style floor vase. It was only $200, and easily worth several times that, but since it was so large and breakable, we left it behind.

We are truly blessed to be in a place with such generous people. It makes treasure hunting and reselling much more fun and worthwhile. It looks like this year will be a good one for our Etsy sales, and we're also selling larger items locally through Facebook Marketplace.

Considering all the great stuff we see at Goodwill and other thrift shops in the greater Portland Oregon area and throughout the Pacific Northwest, you really never know what we'll find next.