A couple of weeks ago a fellow came to my house looking for some furniture. He needed stuff to put in a mobile home he recently purchased and I happened to be able to take him around to a few places.

Our first stop was Coby’s Cheap Used Furniture Emporium, a place that is sporadically located, vaguely priced, generally negotiated and guaranteed to be cheap.

With credentials like that, it is no wonder that most of my customers offer repeat business.

In my various storage areas, I always have a number of items that I have come across. Some are things that I bought and no longer need, some are things that I found, bought as investments or traded for, and the rest is just plain old junk.

In giving a background for where a good portion of this stuff came from, another of my friends recently left the area for parts unknown and came to me with a moving sale offer. I basically bought everything in his house for one reasonable price. The catch was that I had to move it all in a two-day time period.

So, I enlisted the help of one of my good friends and went over there on a Friday night and packed up a big truckload. The next day, I took two more truckloads, which succeeded in cleaning out the house. I took all of the stuff to my place in the woods and packed it up in the kitchen and living room, leaving barely enough room to edge around it.

A good part of the bulky stuff was furniture and the remainder was stuff that a body would typically find at a yard sale — glassware, silverware, knife sets and odds and ends.

In fact, we did have a yard sale on a recent weekend and took an entire truckload of stuff. We made $75 and still came back home with an entire truckload of stuff again. It doesn’t really make sense to me. I did see some empty boxes where part of the stuff had been stored, but when the truck was packed up again, it was all full. It is the opposite of the sock-in-the-dryer phenomenon.

Anyway, this fellow that came by has a similar idea to mine as far as good stuff versus bad stuff. He thinks that it is all good stuff. He tries to buy all of his furniture and other household items used instead of getting it new and worrying about the retail mark-ups. His timing was perfect.

He ended up with a couch and chair, a complete set of coffee cups and dishes, a component stereo with a six disc changer, tuner and cassette player, a floor model television, a microwave and stand, an antique cast iron ‘Farmer’s Favorite’ stove, an area rug, assorted cutlery and silverware, a collection of shot glasses, a heavy coffee table, two end tables, three lamps, a Dale Earnhardt cigarette lighter, a collection of cassettes and compact discs, a dish drainer, a bathroom set, mini-blinds, curtains and other items too numerous to mention. Of course, he came out for the price that a couch and chair alone would have cost him at retail.

I like to trade almost as much as I like to eat; it has always been one of my favorite pastimes. I can usually trade with almost anyone, with a few exceptions. Trading is 20 percent talking, 70 percent negotiating and 10 percent planning and foreknowledge. The hard part is knowing the value of a vast number of items.

The catch is, you have to find someone who wants to trade for whatever it is you have first. Then you have to find something they have for which you would like to trade. That is usually a relatively easy thing to do, but not always.

In my case, I sometimes trade for things just for the sake of making a trade. It is one of the few social outlets that men in these mountains have traditionally held.

I know my father used to do quite a bit of trading, often buying used cars and fixing them up to sell. I picked up that vice off him, except for the fact that I hate to sell them once I buy them.

I wonder if people in other parts of the country trade cars, knives, guns and junk? I imagine that some do, but I know that a few of the city people that I have met in my life looked at me like I was insane when I suggested that they try to trade something off to someone else. The fine art of trading has often allowed me to live beyond my means, repair broken things without having money and even provided much-needed income in times of financial difficulty. Of course, times of financial difficulty are plentiful and frequent around the LaRue estate.

The hard part about doing this sort of thing is trying to balance the demand for an item with its value and storage requirement. For instance, a large bedroom suite is valuable and is in demand, but it also requires a great deal of storage space. Therefore, an item like a rifle or shotgun is much preferable because it is easy to move around and has a similar value.

On the other hand, look at something like a parking lot vacuum, which happens to be something I somehow got involved in selling recently. It is a specialty item with value, but demand for that isn’t very high. That being the case, along with the storage aspect, makes me wonder what I am doing with such an item. Of course, I am not always right. Some of the things I think would never sell go right away, while items I think would be snatched up quickly sometimes tarry for months and months.

One thing I don’t like about trading is having to move my ‘inventory’ of items from one place to another. Usually storage is a commodity that is hard to come by and I have a problem with getting all the things I have where I need them to be.

For instance, if I want to have a yard sale, I need all my yard sale items to be in one place. However, I may also need whatever is under the yard sale items, like a table or desk, uncovered to show to someone. That’s where all the work comes in. Somethings I moved four or five times before I finally found someone who wanted to purchase them. It’s hard to come out like that. But it’s not really the money or goods you trade for that make it worthwhile, it’s really just the fun of doing it. That’s something many folks don’t understand.

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