Sale-ing Takes My Stuff Away

If you have been reading my last so many blogs, you know that we have been doing some serious cleaning at my house. And twice a year, spring or fall cleaning ends in a garage sale. All of the things that we have Bins and Purge –d from our house go into the garage, and sit until its time to have our community garage sale. Some of those items must be carefully contained so that no children see what has been so discreetly removed from their rooms while they were at school or they will end up bringing those items back into the house.  The rest of the items are in boxes, bins, our piled on top of folding tables.

A day before the garage sale I go into the garage and break out more folding tables, wipe them down and then start with the clothes. I group all the clothes into piles of pants, short-sleeved shirts, longs sleeved shirts, sweatshirts, shorts, skirts, ….so on and so forth and then make sections for boys clothes, girls clothes, adults clothes. I never got to work at The Gap, and garage sales are my way of making up for that loss. I will make everything nice and neat and organized, and an hour into our garage sale, everything will be a mess again. And as if my garage is The Gap, I will swoop in, between customers, and resort all of the items, so my customers can easily find what they are looking for.  I usually put a sign on my clothes table saying "all items fifty cents", but this year we branched out and bought a clothes rack to hang the items that were worth putting individual tags on. By worth it I mean more than fifty cents and as high as four dollars a piece. Hey, I have to eat the cost of the ripped in half printable envelope label to price those items. (Not to mention the twenty-five dollars it cost to buy the clothes rack).

The books are sorted into two bins, adult books (no not those kind) and children’s books, again fifty cents apiece. There is a toy table for toys ABOVE twenty five cents, and a bin for toys that ARE twenty five cents, which usually consists of McDonald’s type toys, parts of other toys, and naked Dirty Barbies.  The shoes are all neatly arranged under the clothes table, you wouldn’t believe how well used shoes sell at garage sales. And then there are the rest of the small items: frames, knick knacks, holiday items, random outdated electronic items, you name it, anything an everything we decided we no longer needed and stuff my mom brings me from her house when she purges her own garage and brings it here for me to re-purge.

As I am in my garage getting things prepared, there are usually one or two neighbors that are also preparing for their garage sale and often we find ourselves at each other’s houses doing some “presale shopping”.  It was awesome when I walked over to my neighbor’s garage and noticed how many items were for sale that had been from my last sale! The best part was that the same was true for me, I had items I had bought from my neighbor that were now for sale, again, at my garage sale. “We are both pathetic",  my neighbor said to me, and I agreed. 

So our garage sale was set to open Friday at 9am, late for a garage sale because most open much earlier, but we needed to get our kids to school before we opened. We have had garage sales for over ten years now, and we know that garage salers can be hardcore. If you do not open when you say you are going to open, they will knock on your door and maybe even peer into your windows. Since we had to get our kids into the car (that is parked in our driveway, not our garage), we have to covertly exit out the back door. There may already be people wandering around near your house depending on when your neighbors opened up, you have to not make eye contact with anyone, quickly get into the car and try not to hit anyone while you are backing up. It’s as close to what it must feel like to be in a crowd of zombies on The Walking Dead. Getting down the street can be just as precarious because people are parked all over the sides of the street, and the rules of the road no longer apply, anarchy rules. Once my husband got back from dropping off the kids, it was time to open, I had my Ace hardware tool smock on to keep my cash and change in (its part of the kids pretend tools set), paper, tape and a Sharpy marker in case something needed to be retagged or marked down.

Once you open the garage, you have to move quick. We needed to get all four of our tables out onto the driveway before people started flooding our garage. Once all the tables were out, there were already people going through some of the bins in our garage, we had to pull the bins out while they were looking through them like using a carrot on a stick to get a horse to follow where he needs to go. It was such a nice day that we were able to have all of our stuff on the driveway and none of it in the garage, which rarely happens, but its great because it alleviates the some of the hyper vigilance you need to have at a garage sale, making sure someone won’t try to buy (or walk off with) something that is not for sale. This year, my husband almost sold my favorite flip flops that were not for sale, luckily I was there when the lady picked them up, they were supposed to have been moved to the back porch to dry in the sun but were laying too close to the front of the house.

My favorite picture of our 2nd garage sale ever.
Our neighbor put on a Halloween costume and
helped us promote our sale, for no reason
except it was fun!

Most people will purchase things for what you have them marked as if you keep things cheap, but there will always be people who want to bargain their way down to as low as they can get you to go. The best example of that this year was a man interested in buying a king sized down comforter I had marked as $10.00. He offered me three dollars for it, I said four, he accepted and I added that there were a few bloody (nose) stains on it, that didn’t deter him, but he came back a few minutes later and asked if he could also have the storage bin it had been sitting in. That is where I drew the line. Nice try, sir, those things are for the junk that comes out of my house in six more months.

The rest of the sale went pretty well, we sold about two hundred and sixty dollars worth of our stuff.  The next day the garage sales continued and I decided to use some of the money we made and go out and hunt for treasure, because what's the fun in just selling your junk? I wanted to go find more! I ended up finding all three of my kids roller blade,  a skateboard, a Barbie bed, and a baby playpen for my daughter’s dolls. I spent about twenty-five dollars total, the kids were super excited about our new fond treasures and for twenty-five dollars, it doesn't matter if they only all roller blade once! As one of my fellow garage salers said it best, “Garage sales are more about entertainment than about necessity.” Well said, random person I was talking to while searching through your stuff! 

Once the garage sale was completely over, we bagged and boxed up what was left and took it to the thrift store, my garage is now as clean as my house is. And we bought a power washer with the rest of the money because the outside of our house is still really dirty. The saga continues...