Episode show notes
Credits
Host: Maggie Blaha
Theme music: “Thanks for the Memory” written by Leo Robin and Ralph Rainger, performed by Bob Hope and Shirley Ross in the 1938 film of the same name
Featured music: “Won’t You Be My Neighbor” (1967) written and performed by Fred M. Rogers
Ever been to a tiny yard sale? We’re pretty sure Karen Anderson Singer, the Founder and Principal Artist of Tiny Doors ATL, invented the concept. And the turnout for her small-scale event is a testament to how much Atlanta loves the Tiny Doors brand.
In this season 2 premiere of Thrift, Maggie talks to Karen about what goes into planning and setting up a tiny yard sale.
Learn more about Tiny Doors ATL on their website, and follow them on Instagram @tinydoorsatl to see what Karen and her team dream up next.
You can find Thrift: What Your Garage Sale Says About You in a few different places on the internet. Choose how you want to follow and engage with us:
Instagram: @thriftpodcast
Facebook: @thriftpodcast
Twitter: @thrift_pod
Episode transcript
OPENING.
Maggie: Since you started Tiny Doors in 2014, you’ve probably been asked what your inspiration was over and over, so I thought I’d try to rephrase it a little, um, why do you want people to have to look down?
Karen Anderson Singer (podcast guest): You know, I want people to look around them and expect art everywhere or anywhere, and down is just the most accessible point. It’s somewhere that everyone can reach, and when I say everyone, I often think about people who are on wheels for various reasons, one of them being wheelchairs. So one of the doors, which has a ladder leading up to it, is actually literally the most wheelchair accessible because it’s a couple feet off the ground.
So one of the things I try to consider is what it means to be super accessible, and I don’t want to put it way up in a tree, I don’t want it to be accessible to no one, I want it to be the most accessible to everyone. So it’s more about accessibility than it is about down.
Maggie: That was Karen Anderson Singer, principal artist and director of Tiny Doors ATL in Atlanta, Georgia, and my guest on this season 2 premiere episode of the podcast. If you’re not from Atlanta or haven’t lived there since 2014, when Karen started installing 7-inch tall doors in neighborhoods across the city, you might not understand the impact seeing a tiny door can have on your day.
I didn’t have a car the last year or so that I lived in Atlanta, so I would walk about 4.5 miles to work every day. My journey always began in the darkness of the morning and ended just as the sun was starting to warm everything up. By the time I would reach the BeltLine—a huge walking path that cuts across different sections of the city and would signal that the end of my walk was nigh—I would be sweaty and hungry and thirsty and tired and ready for whatever day of the week it was to be over.
But then I would catch sight of Door #13 placed high up on the wall of a tunnel with its tiny little rope ladder dangling beneath it, or the vibrant red Door #6 in front of the store Paris on Ponce, and they would remind me to appreciate my walk. I mean, you can’t suddenly happen upon a tiny door when you’re stuck in rush hour traffic. Beyond helping me appreciate my long walk, tiny doors always reminded me to pay attention to my surroundings, to see the art in the everyday.
In this episode, Karen and I will be discussing a unique yard sale she held over the summer, and how yard sales can be considered art.
You’re listening to Thrift: What Your Garage Sale Says About You, a podcast that explores the stories behind the things we once loved and are ready to let go of.
THEME MUSIC. [30 SECONDS]
INTRO.
Maggie: I’m Maggie Blaha, and I’m excited to be back with some new episodes that I really can’t wait to share with all of you. If you tuned in for the first season, welcome back. If this is your first time listening, I’m glad to have you, and I hope you’ll go back and listen to last season’s episodes to learn more about why I started this podcast.
The short of it is that I found a copy of Judith Martin’s Guide to Excruciatingly Correct Behavior with an interesting inscription on the first page at a library book sale, and I just couldn’t stop thinking about the person it belonged to and the story behind it. I decided I wanted to start a podcast to tell the stories behind the stuff we’ve had for a while and, for whatever reason, decide to get rid off. Visiting yard sales and talking to people about what they’re selling seemed like the best way to do this.
In this episode, I explore how yard sales could be considered an art form by talking to an artist about replicating a yard sale on a tiny scale. Karen hosted a tiny yard sale in Atlanta over the summer, and I’m really bummed I couldn’t actually be there for the event. I caught up with her a couple weeks later to talk about how it went, but she did send me lots of pictures that I’ll be sharing on social, on the website, and in the newsletter, so be sure to check those out; I’ll tell you how to do that at the end of the episode.
PT. 1 - What does a tiny yard sale look like?
Maggie: So what is a tiny yard sale? What is the point? How would someone even go about setting one up? Like any regular scale yard sale, a tiny yard sale is about getting rid of stuff you don’t need and engaging with your community.
But is a tiny yard just as hard, if not harder, to set up than your average yard sale? I’ll let Karen answer that.
[CLIP]
Karen: So the tiny yard sale was a total dream. It was one of those things, you know sometimes, [after] 5 years of doing Tiny Doors, I want to try new things, and it’s as much to maintain my own interest as it is to maintain my audience or any of that other stuff social media people will say about fresh content. It’s really about my own curiosity.
Before I’ve done things like a tiny parade float at the front of the Pride Parade or the giant door, you know, things that I was like, “Can it, can it happen?” And what does it look like if it does happen. The yard sale was one of those things. I thought, “Can a tiny yard sale happen, an actual one?” And I don’t think it has ever, ever happened before. There were no examples. You know, you could make a fake tiny yard sale, set up one with props; that’s been done. Or just selling miniatures if you’re a dollhouse store, you know, like outside.
[Maggie interjects]
Maggie: Did you consider contacting [The] Guinness Book of World Records or something?
Karen: No, I just needed to see it done. So then this was a first; there weren’t examples, I couldn’t Pinterest it. And that’s a problem that I have all the time. I can’t really Pinterest all these big ideas, I can’t look them up. I have to decide what it looks like, which is a fun challenge, but I thought, “OK, it’s gotta be a yard. So what does the yard look like?” Well, if you put it on an actual yard, the grass is going to dwarf these less-than-an-inch-high items. So I need astroturf, but I need good astroturf, because the really fake stuff is gonna look really fake when you get close up.
So I had 12 feet of tables and 12 feet of astroturf, and it’s just on the BeltLine, and I’m like, “That’s not enough. I need to really sell it. It needs to feel like a yard.” So I went to the dollhouse store where I’ve known the owners for years, because they’ve watched me come and buy tiny things, and they loaned me a dollhouse. It was actually this gorgeous 4-story, $1,500 dollhouse, that took up the entire back of my SUV. It was terrifying to move. I was scared of 2 things: 1.) that I would break it and 2.) that I would buy it. Or break it and then have to buy it.
The next morning we set up—12 feet of astroturf, a giant dollhouse, and all these tiny items—and I spent the whole night before making tables. The items were things like tiny guitars and tiny teddy bears, and they’re all leftover from projects, so I didn’t buy things to sell at the yard sale. It’s not beyond me to do something like that, but I didn’t in this case. I really had all these items leftover.
So I had to think about display. I couldn’t just lay everything out in the grass, I had to think about what an actual yard sale looks like. So I had to make a lot of tables kind of in a hurry. I used the tops of birch boxes and dowels, and I hot glued a bunch of tables.
[END CLIP]
Maggie: The challenge for Karen was taking all the elements of a typical yard sale and reproducing them in a way that felt real on a small scale. Even though the sale was real—Karen was really looking to get rid of a lot of miniature items. But she had to put a lot of thought into recreating all the details that would make this tiny yard sale recognizable. That’s part of what makes her tiny doors so delightful: We get a chance to see what our world would look like in miniature.
[CLIP]
Maggie: Did you get to a point where you were putting a lot of fake colored stickers on things?
Karen: Thought about it, decided against it. What I did do was make, I thought about, you know, I’m from a small town in Michigan, and I thought about how everywhere you go there are boxes of kittens and puppies. Hopefully that’s improving, but I made some little cardboard ‘Adopt Me’ boxes and put tiny animals in them, and they all found homes really quickly.
It was really fun to sort of play with that. Someone said, “Do you have any tiny babies?” And I was like, “No. I do, but I didn’t bring them because it’s a yard sale and you can’t sell babies.” They were like, “Oh, I guess you gotta draw the line.” I was like, “Yeah…”
[END CLIP]
PT. 2 - Who goes to a tiny yard sale?
Maggie: Karen estimates that around 200 people showed up at 8am on a Saturday morning for a tiny yard sale on the BeltLine. And people really got into the spirit of what Karen was trying to do, bringing cake and popcorn to turn the sale into a kind of neighborhood block party. It just shows how much people really love the Tiny Doors brand.
But I think the turnout for this event also says something about Atlanta. Having lived in Atlanta for 5 years, I attended my fair share of unique events. When I saw the invite to Karen’s tiny yard sale pop up in my Facebook feed, it felt very Atlanta to me.
[CLIP]
Karen: One of my favorite things that I’ve ever heard said about Atlanta is, “We didn’t invent it, we just made it better.” Like we didn’t invent hip hop, we just took it to another level. We didn’t invent, I mean, there are so many examples of that, but one of them is we didn’t invent small doors, we just took it to another level. Fairy doors have existed for so long, but Atlanta believed in this and has followed me along on this and has been like, “OK, what are we doing now? We’re doing a yard sale? Cool.”
I love that about Atlanta! Their belief that we can make anything better. Anything! We can take train tracks and make it into 1 of the best sidewalks in the world. We can just improve it, and I think that’s cool. There’s a lot to improve, but it’s a lovely city that really does believe in sort of the unexpected.
[END CLIP]
Maggie: Even though Atlanta is a cool city that’s pretty much open for anything, I wondered if Karen had an ideal audience for this yard sale.
[CLIP]
Karen: You know, that’s a good question about the audience. I really kind of didn’t know, because it was very much a flash yard sale. It was 2 hours on a Saturday morning, that’s it. You know sometimes it’ll be like 8am-3pm on Saturday. No. This was 2 hours, because I had to staff it. I had to make this yard sale happen, so it was quick, and it was a quick turnaround.
So I figured that it would be a really specific group of people who could get it together early on a Saturday morning and kind of lived close enough. I was surprised to hear how many people drove to come to this yard sale. And I also didn’t want to do it later in the day because there’s just a lot of people on the BeltLine and the parking gets hard, and I figured that it was just an easy way to do that.
There were like 30 people waiting when it opened, and then it was really intense for about an hour, and then it started pouring rain. What I’m surprised by is that a 1-hour yard sale—because, let’s be real, when it started raining people stopped coming—ended up being really successful.
Maggie: And it seems like it wasn’t necessarily artists coming to buy the stuff?
Karen: I think it was neighbors who live there and thought, “Oh cool, I can go down there and get some tiny things.” I didn’t meet a lot of artists who told me that they were artists, so I don’t know necessarily what people are planning to do with that tiny stuff, but I look forward to seeing pictures if they do do something fun.
[END CLIP]
Maggie: So most people who stopped by just wanted to see what a tiny yard sale would look like; they didn’t really need to buy anything. But that’s kind of true of all yard sales. I didn’t need to pick up an ice cream maker from a neighbor’s moving sale a couple months ago or buy a book about the lives of a cell from a stoop sale. In the moment I felt like I needed those things, but I also wanted to help my neighbors out, to take part in my community, even in a small way.
That seems to be the art, the beauty of all yard sales.
[CLIP]
Karen: Yeah, you know, I think people have yard sales as a way to purge their stuff, but it also demonstrates that you’re not afraid of your neighbors or your neighborhood; that you welcome them into your yard, into your space. You welcome them to see your stuff. It’s really a brave thing to do, to let people see who you are and the things you don’t want. It’s kind of intimate and fascinating.
I could not stop talking to people about the stuff they were buying. I was like, “I need to shut up.” People were buying these tiny canvases and I’m going, “Those were leftover from a project I did with Wolfgang Puck where I made 200 tiny paintings and they took them to his place in Washington, D.C., and people were like, ‘OK, cool.’”
Also, nothing at the yard sale was over $5. Even though, if you went online, a lot of the things I sold would cost more than $5. I had them leftover, I sold them for cheap. I didn’t treat it like a tiny profit machine. I kind of didn’t know how to handle it when people were haggling. I was unprepared for that yard-sale etiquette. As an artist, I didn’t know how to handle people haggling me. Is that what it’s called?
Maggie: Yeah, and it happens all the time at yard sales.
Karen: Yeah, that’s not, I had no idea. I was really ill-prepared for that. I just was like, “What? You want to pay less? But if you bought that online it would be $12, but I want you to be happy. I don’t know what to do!” So that was a little tricky…
Maggie: So, how did you overcome that? Did you just let them take it for what they were asking?
Karen: Yeah. I kind of was just like, “I don’t know, it’s to support Tiny Doors ATL, pay what you want.” They were like, “Oh, OK.” I’m doing this to raise money to support the maintenance of the doors with this old stuff. What was funny was that my wife saw all this old stuff leaving the house in the morning and she was like, “Oh, is this gonna free up space in the studio?” My studio is 8’ X 8’, it is extremely small. I was like, “Nope, this is just stuff that’s in boxes. Those boxes are still there. I’m just gonna put more stuff in them.”
Maggie: I mean, with yard sales you’re never really getting rid of things, you’re just making room for more stuff.
[ADVERTISEMENT]
Maggie: My name is Maggie, and I’m a struggling artist. Why am I interrupting the podcast to tell you this? Well, because I’d like to ask all you lovely listeners for your support. Putting out a podcast takes a lot of time, energy, and, yes, it requires a little money, too. Starting this month, I’m going to be introducing a few different ways you can support the podcast, whether you have the financial means to do so or not. Every little bit helps, and I’d certainly appreciate any way you can help me spread the word about Thrift. Now back to the episode.
[END ADVERTISEMENT]
[PLAY MR. ROGERS THEME MUSIC]
PT. 3 - It’s a lovely day in the neighborhood
Maggie: “Won’t you be my neighbor?” In this current political climate where everyone seems divided and unable to trust one another, I think that having a yard sale can be a simple way to ask people in your community, ‘Won’t you be my neighbor?’ It’s like Karen said: Having a yard sale is a way to show that you aren’t afraid of your neighbors.
Karen is someone who really loves Atlanta and the neighborhood she lives in, and this shows in her art. She won’t install a tiny door in any location around the city unless it’s been invited. Once it has, she spends a lot of time talking to people and getting a sense of what kind of door she should build to reflect a specific neighborhood.
She likes to attend yard sales that are a reflection of their neighborhoods, too.
[CLIP]
Maggie: Do you shop at yard sales yourself?
Karen: I do shop at yard sales. I really enjoy, the same thing people enjoyed about my yard sale, is when they’re in my neighborhood and I can just walk to it. To me that makes it feel really local and fun.
[END CLIP]
Maggie: Another thing Karen likes about yard sales, and this includes her own, is something we’ve heard before on this podcast: You get to learn the stories behind the things you’re buying or tell people the stories behind the things you’re selling.
[CLIP]
Karen: I think it’s fun when you’re exploring a yard sale to think about who it belonged to and what they did with it. Although sometimes that prevents me from wanting to buy it. You know, because you just don’t know. But with the tiny yard sale I think it was kinda fun because everything had a story, and I was there to tell it and excited to tell it. A lot of the items had already, you had seen them online in one way or another, so that was kinda fun.
But I do think that those kind of stories tie in also to tiny doors, in people using their imagination to go, “OK, why is this here? Who put this here? Who else is interacting with it? And are they thinking the same thing I am?”
[END CLIP]
Maggie: One thing I was curious about was whether Karen had a hard time letting anything go. Since this was a yard sale mainly intended to engage people in her community, I wondered if that meant that she didn’t have any attachment to the miniatures she was selling.
[CLIP]
Karen: That’s a good question, whether or not it was hard to let the tiny items go. It was difficult to part with some things like canvases and guitars and things I have other ideas for, because everything in my studio has a reason that it’s there, and the reason that it’s there is that I believe in its potential to be something else. That’s what stuff in a studio is. It’s stuff you’re gonna use to make other things. But I let them go, and I’m glad that I did, because there’s a little more room in the studio. But mostly it was for the community engagement factor, and that might be what separates the tiny yard sale from other yard sales is that it’s not like I was getting rid of the treadmill that was taking up half the living room and now I can buy an ottoman. It was like letting go of things so that other people could enjoy them, too.
The stuff that didn’t sell I brought back to the studio and put in a box marked ‘yard sale.’ And it’s shoebox size, you know, because nothing was terribly big. And that is, so that next time, if we want to do another yard sale, I can, and I have that stuff there. I think it probably would have sold if it didn’t rain the last hour of the yard sale, but I’m saving it. I would do another yard sale again.
[END CLIP]
PT. 4 - What about stuff in your own home?
Maggie: So, learning about this tiny yard sale was great and all, but I wanted to know what sort of things Karen would have to part with if she were to host a regular-scale yard sale. One where she’s selling stuff from her home and not from her studio.
[CLIP]
Karen: Probably kitchen items. I think we accumulate too many kitchen items. I’m gonna totally put my wife on blast here in that she saves sauce jars to use as cups, even though we have so many cups! So, the sauce jars...either the sauce jars or the cups would go. In her defense, they’re cool and they make great glasses, it’s just that it gets to a critical mass.
And linens. My yard sale would mostly be kitchen stuff and linens.
Maggie: I would go to that yard sale.
Karen: It would be good. I collect linens, and then, you know, don’t use them. I go to Final Cut, which is where they sell all the Anthropologie stuff from the catalogue. So they like use it in the actual shoot, and then they can’t sell it in the store, so they send all the stuff to this warehouse-style thrift store. It’s in Augusta, so it’s a couple hours away. But they have all these amazing Anthropologie and Urban Outfitters bedspreads and sheets for really cheap, so I buy them. I’m like, “We can use them for the guest beds.” We don’t have guest beds, we just have couches.
We have too many linens! That’s me putting myself on blast. I’m a collector of linens, my wife collects sauce jars. None of it’s criminal, but it would all end up in a yard sale.
[END CLIP]
CONCLUSION
Maggie: Thanks so much! Is there anything that you would want to plug, or how can people support Tiny Doors ATL? Where can people learn more about Tiny Doors?
Karen: Sure, a really good way to connect with Tiny Doors ATL is through Instagram, it’s just @tinydoorsatl. I also have a Patreon, which is a fun way, if you want any of these tiny items, some of the items from the yard sale were previously part of projects that I made and shipped to all my patrons. So there are a couple ways you can connect with Tiny Doors ATL, no matter where you live.
OUTRO.
[10 SECONDS]
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