Garage Sale Recap
March 30, 2008
This really was the garage sale to end all garage sales. We (the Sloniger, Gumm, and Bruyns families) have been blessed to overflowing with donations from people over the last couple of months. We filled up Jen’s carport, storage room and patio and my garage. So much so that we decided to just sell the stuff already at Jen’s house this weekend, then bring the leftovers to our house for another sale this weekend.
We spent about 10 hours on Thursday pricing things and trying to get stuff organized as best we could, but honestly we were very overwhelmed. Stacey and Sherry came to our rescue and helped with pricing for several hours too.
I didn’t get to bed Thurs until about 12:30 and it was at least 1:30 a.m. before I fell asleep. I was up again at 4 to head to Jen and Dustin’s house. We started pulling tables out into the driveway, moving out the big furniture, etc to start the sale at 6. Dustin put our alloted 6 signs (city requirement) and the traffic started to flow. We got quite a bit of traffic from moms after they dropped their kids off at school, even people on their way to work.
Things we learned:
- People will buy it. Seriously, the stuff you think is junk, someone thinks is great. Honestly, some of the stuff we didn’t even know what it was. Put a 25 cent tag on it and you can guarantee that it is bought.
- Clothes – typically not a huge seller but we had TONS of them – seriously like at least a 20 huge yard garbage bags full. Jen had the great idea of doing Fill A Bag for $5. I bought a couple rolls of 4 gallon trash bags (like for little wastebaskets). Then we just laid a sheet out on Jen’s lawn and dumped the clothes in huge piles. There were people who literally spent an hour sifting through just the clothes. We didn’t even get all of them put out. I think this weekend we’ll try to sort them a little better (we did just kids and adults last weekend) and hopefully we’ll get rid of even more of them.
- There are some people who will ALWAYS negotiate with you. It’s a $1 dish and they want to know if you’ll take 50 cents for it. Come on!
- Stacey told me that in her experience Fridays are actually better garage sale days than Sat. and she was RIGHT. Our take on Friday was almost double what we made on Saturday.
We closed up shop about 1 on Friday afternoon. We were all soooooo tired! I was in bed by 7:30 that night.
Saturday we were back at it from 6 a.m. til about 2. The traffic does really die down around 1 though. Then we loaded up all the leftover stuff to bring it over to our house. We’ll add our garage full of stuff to it and have at least one more day of sale this weekend.
Here’s a few pictures but really, they don’t even give you an idea of the amount of stuff we had.
This is the trailer loaded up with all the leftovers. And that is Kim’s way-too-smart 3 year old Judah who pulled the tricycle up to the trailer, got out and proceeded to lower the trailer down until it was resting on the back of his bike 
We have the classic yard sale story from years ago. Bill & I had gone to this auction at a farm and Bill bid on a box and got it. We took it home and there were all these old tool looking things in there, some of which we had no idea what they were or what they were for. We put out several of them at a yard sale we had. A pretty fancy Cadillac pulled up to our curb and the lady got out while the man sat in the car. She charged up our driveway staight to this box of stuff, picked up one of these tool-looking things and said to me, “What is this and what does it do?” I said I didn’t know but I would ask my husband. He said he didn’t know either and she said, “Oh well, I’ll take it anyway.” She didn’t try to get it cheaper and didn’t have a clue what it was but she bought it and left. Amazing!