Going north on U.S. 19 and just beyond State Road 52, stands a bright yellow building.
Displayed outside a variety of items that includes a 6-foot high metal guitar, a 1950s hair dryer, and a one-legged skeleton with one bony finger on the trigger of a long rifle. Not the sort of stuff you would normally find in other local thrift stores in Hernando and Pasco counties.
This is the Neat Stuff Plus Thrift Store and the domain of Pete Mendrala.
Mendrala hails from Nyack, an arts and antiques town on the Hudson River roughly 25 miles north of Midtown Manhattan.
Neat Stuff is not an antique shop, where exorbitant prices are asked for items, but more a place of rest for objects rescued from doom and destruction or fire and flood. The objects at Neat Stuff have been gathered meticulously by Mendrala from all over the U.S.
Comprising several rooms, this junk shop is stacked high to the ceiling with all manner of forgotten, dusty things.
“I love collecting junk,” said Mendrala. The weirder the better,” he said.
Mendrala presides from the counter in the center of the shop and said he started collecting unusual stuff more than 40 years ago.
“It was my friend Bill Perry that first introduced me to the trade,” he said. I was 13-years old and he would take me along with him when he did house clearances and estate sales in the north east.”
When Perry died, Mendrala continued doing house clearances and estate sales as well as emptying storage units and overseeing restaurant overhauls.
People either love or hate junk items but Mendrala has developed a real passion for the unusual.
“I like the kind of stuff you don’t normally see; stuff like a human skeleton or half a real brain,” he said. “Once, I even had a stuffed, three-headed chicken. We had it x-rayed and, true enough, it was a three-headed chicken,” he said.
“My wife hated the stuff. I had a 7-foot tall polar bear in the bedroom and I used to hang my pajamas on it,” he laughed.
“I loved that polar bear.”
People have been collectors since the beginning of time. It was a matter of survival then. Nowadays, collecting is for different reasons – sometimes intellectual, sometimes aesthetic.
Neat Stuff is one of those places that’s dusty, cluttered and seemingly disorganized but guaranteed you will want to linger to find that one something to take home.
“If there’s more than one of something, then I don’t want it,” Mendrala said.
Customers can wander through aisles cluttered with shelf after shelf full of dish ware, old photos, postcards from around the world, used books, jewelry, briefcases, belts, handbags, vintage toys even.
Mendrala said he sells a ton of nautical items that a guy from Key West makes.
“The lamps are ships, fish heads, lighthouses – that’s all he makes and people love them,” he said.
Customer Donald Loeven from Spring Hill has known Pete Mendrala for years and regularly calls in to browse around.
“I like old farm tools or fishing gear,” he said. “But mostly I like dropping by to talk with Pete and see how things are going.”
Through the years, Mendrala said he has come across a lot of unusual items. The most valuable item he found was a large bronze statue of a woman holding a lamp.
“It turned out to be a Tiffany lamp about 4-foot wide and very heavy,” he said.
Disappearing around a corner, he reappeared holding a 5-foot long metal item.
“This,” he said, “is a two-man hedge trimmer that came from a farm in Pennsylvania.”
Disappearing again, he returned with a wooden seeder.
“I got this out of an old barn I was tearing down,” he said. “You put the seeds in this container and then you push the struts together to sow the seeds.”
Neat Stuff receives new merchandise regularly and Mendrala’s son brings down a semi-truck from New York about every couple of months full of funky finds and true vintage bric-a-brac.
“I sold a stuffed skunk last week,” said Mendrala. “I’ve had a stuffed horse, a stuffed dog and once I shipped a whole stagecoach from Palisades Park in California.”
Mendrala never knows from week to week what kind of stuff is coming in.
“There’s a lot of value in old stuff, weird stuff,” he said. “Not just financial value but heritage, craftsmanship.”
“My customers appreciate that kind of value, the craftsmanship in wood furniture, old values – which is why I have many regulars who just come by to check out what’s new,” he said.
Junk shops, these days, are fast disappearing so Neat Stuff is a diamond in the rough.
If you’re in the mood to dig, nine times out of ten you’ll find that special vintage item you’ve been seeking.
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IF YOU GO
Neat Stuff Plus Thrift Store is located at 12228 US19 in Hudson.
Phone: 727.455.5109
Hours of Operation
Wednesday thru Sunday
11 a.m. to 5:30 p.m.
but best to call first!
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If you would like your business featured in the Hernando Sun, contact Sue Quigley at saffronbleu@hotmail.com or call her at 727.808.9587.