Wednesday, September 2, 2009

Garage Sale Success!

What's the best thing to do when you move to a new place and find that, despite the hugeness of the new place, that you have a whole lot of stuff that you no longer need? Have a kick-a** garage sale!
The subdivision where we now live hosted a neighborhood garage sale a couple of weeks ago, so we decided to join in the fun. Here's a few helpful tips for hosting your own garage sale:

Step 1: Haul all of the stuff you no longer want to the garage. We put little colored stickers on everything, which took some prep the night before; in the future, I may just do a "$1 table" or "$.50 corner" to save time.

We continued my mom's tradition of having a "free box" of the stuff that you really have no use for, but feel guilty about charging money for, say, half used detergent. Highly popular.


Step 2: Move the larger items towards the end of the garage to *lure* in potential buyers.


Step 3: Convince a couple of extra nice guys to sit in your hot garage and entice the ladies to buy more.

(In this case, Tony and brother-in-law Marty played the role of sexy, sweaty salesmen).

Step 4: Sit back and watch that moola pour in!

Actually, people didn't buy nearly as much stuff as I thought they would, and buyers were definitely looking for rock-bottom deals - as in, I will buy that bookcase that you paid $80 for less than a year ago for $3. I blame the economy.

But in the end, we made quite a bit of cash! Since we joined forces with my boss lady/landlord and Tony's family, we had to keep track of who-sold-what. By the end of the weekend, sister-in-law Sam made $45, boss lady made $75, and we made a whooping $170. And we got rid of a ton of excess clutter. Woo-hoo!

Making money AND decluttering? Be still my heart.

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