Garage Selling

Garage sales. Is there any other form of torture that is witnessed by so many (or in our case on Saturday...so few) people? Okay...the next time I say I'm going to have a garage sale or I even hint at possibly toying with the idea of having a garage sale someone...anyone please slap me silly and direct me to read this post!

When I moved home from college last year, my mom had to find a place for all her stuff that had taken over my room. A lot went to storage and then a lot went to a garage sale pile. Well, when I was packing up for that move I had a lot of stuff for storage and then some garage sale stuff. At Christmas, my mom decided that we had an abundance of stuff so again....more stuff for the garage sale pile. That was growing daily it seemed so we talked about having a garage sale in the spring. Those of you that live in Texas or any place down south know that Spring is only about 15 minutes long so our window of opportunity was small. Unfortunately, my great grandmother had a massive heart attack and the ensuing craziness of that prevented us from having a garage sale.

After much discussion (where in the end I convinced my mom that a garage sale was a good idea) a date was set, an ad bought, and all that was left was to wag out that pile of crap and price it. Setting a date...easy. Buying an ad...costly but relatively easy. Dragging out crap...dirty and hot and not so easy. Pricing...confusing. You want the stuff to sell but you also want to make a profit...it's a fine line people! Setting it up...not too bad. Instead of doing it in the middle of the day on Thursday we did it late that night. And I mean 9pm kind of late. Anyway, the stuff was out and covered and we were going to be ready Friday morning.

Let me stop here....why do people come to a garage sale earlier than what the ad says? Are they hoping they'll be the first to pick through our junk? Is there some "first in line!" prize out there that I don't know about? The ad clearly said 8am. We had people driving by and attempting to stop at 7:15am. One guy even had the nerve to ask..."Are you going to get this show on the road anytime soon?" So, fine...we bowed to the masses (or at least that guy) and opened up. We had several shoppers Friday, but by noon we were hot, sweaty, and ready to come in for lunch. I taped up closed until tomorrow signs and we came in. The only sad thing was that we had to repeat the whole process again the next morning. And there came the rub. While we had a decent showing for a Friday I was really expecting the people to pour in on Saturday. They didn't. And about 11:30am we discovered why....every third Saturday of the month the little historical town outside of my town has it's citywide flea market. Everyone was there! So, while we had traffic coming through we didn't sale a lot. I was kinda disappointed. Here I'd worked my bum off trying to get everything together, priced, put out, and the showing was small.

At least we made enough money to pay for the gas to get me moved, I had a little bowling money, and a friend's sister came and hauled away the remains. And I learned two important lessons...don't have garage sales when it's triple digits outside and well....don't have garage sales!