Garage Sale Fever

Today was our annual garage sale. Boy, am I ever glad it’s over.

We have a garage sale every year, because it really helps keep clutter under control. However, every single year, after it’s over, I tell myself that I will never, ever have another garage sale. I will just box up the junk and haul it to Goodwill. Right.

I never keep this resolution. You know why? Because garage saling is a sickness! It’s an addiction! When garage sale fever is in your blood, you simply cannot stop! Really, it’s true. My fellow salers will attest to this.

Am I the only one who can’t sleep the night before a garage sale? Every year, I lay awake until the wee hours, worrying and fretting. What if it rains? What if nobody shows up? What if I did all this work, folding and pricing and organizing, and nobody buys anything?

As it turns out, I had nothing to worry about. It was citywide garage sale weekend here, and we had a constant stream of customers all day:

(See how my husband cleverly rigged up an extra table by balancing an old piece of countertop on top of our wheelbarrow? Funny!)

At one point, we were so busy that everything went wrong. It was very crowded, and a woman had her just-purchased casserole dish knocked out of her hands, and it smashed all over the concrete floor. Another woman got upset with me because apparently she had asked if I would hold a Crock Pot for her while she finished shopping, and I forgot and sold it to someone else. In my defense, I was very distracted because I was trying to make change while my husband swept up broken glass, and Babycakes was shrieking because she wanted a cup of lemonade (which she then dumped all over her shirt), and Bee kept asking me to count the money she had earned, and people were waiting (impatiently) for me to total up their purchases, and aaahhhhhh! I can’t even do basic math with a calculator at the best of times (OK, this is a slight exaggeration), but under these circumstances, I was practically crippled with “I hate numbers I have an English degree” fear of inadequacy. Fortunately, the person who bought the Crock Pot was still there, so we were able to get it back and correct my mistake. Crisis averted.

Bee had her first ever lemonade and cookie stand, and she made 22 bucks! Can you believe that?

I think people were charmed by her handmade sign, which she made with no help from us:

The “NO” in front of “lemonade” was added when the supply ran out, and the purple crayon embellishments were added by Babycakes, to give the sign some flair.

My Dad brought over some stuff for the sale, along with donuts for breakfast:

I parted with most of the girls’ baby clothes. I anticipated that I would feel sad, but as it turns out, I was really fine with letting them go. I kept special things, like their baptism dresses and the sleepers they wore home from the hospital, but I don’t need to keep anything else. Now other babies can wear those clothes, and I can be free of the burden of storing them.

We cleared $167 in profit (not counting Bee’s cookie money), and my Dad made another $75. We also sold about $60 in merchandise for some friends. I figured that I had 11 hours of work in preparing for the sale, and we gave up 6 hours of our day to run it, for a wage of about $10 an hour. The best part is, we got rid of a whole lot of stuff, and had some fun too.

Next week, I plan to list some of the unsold items on eBay, because certain things just sell better that way. I’ll write more in future posts about our former life as eBay Powersellers, but for now, I’m going to ignore the fact that my house is a total pigsty (as is always the case on garage sale day) and hit the sack. My paltry 3 hours of sleep last night has really caught up with me!

Tagged as: Getting Organized, Tightwad Treasures