We woke up on Saturday morning to a miserable, rainy, generally yucky day. Not what I was hoping for on the day of our garage sale. We bought balloons to put out and as soon as they got outside, they just flopped over. Thankfully, it was a true garage sale and we were inside. We advertised on Craig’s List and got some people from that ad. We also put out signs in the major intersections and got a few people from those. It helps that we live across the street from a shopping center so there’s a fair amount of traffic coming through on Saturday.

We had a steady stream of people come through. My favorite were the ladies who came in speaking Spanish criticizing some of my prices. I had $30 for a piece of luggage and they said “$30? Who is going to pay $30?” To which I replied, “Hola, como estas?” I think they were a little surprised. They did buy something for $1 which I thought was out of obligation. It made me panic for a second and question my pricing, but since it was only 8:15 I decided to relax. The luggage sold for $30 a few hours later.

I think we sold about 60% of our stuff. Most of the stuff that didn’t sell was all the knick-knacky stuff, scrapbooking stuff, picture frames, sweaters and handbags. I will say that I probably priced the handbags high because I thought I could get a good price for them on Ebay. We divided up the stuff into goodwill and Ebay. The goodwill pile is considerably smaller than it was pre-garage sale. The Ebay pile is also smaller than it was. Yay!

So, you’re probably curious as to how much money we made. And the answer is (drumroll please) $287. It exceeded my breakeven point. And I feel it was a fair return on the amount of time I put into it. And I did put a lot of time into the preparation. The last two photos are of a “table” I put together. I was needing more horizontal space and couldn’t find another table so I balanced two planks of wood on our recycling bins and then threw a bedsheet over it. Actually, it did the trick even though it looks pretty unstable.

I’ll put together some garage sale tips and put those in another post. It was successful this time, but I’m not going to be doing this for a few years.

Tags: garage sale