I Survived the Garage Sale

The sale went well.  It really did.  I’m just too exhausted to be excited or feel anything about it at all.  But I’m here to share my experience with all of you. :)

I didn’t follow my own rules.  My friends and I stayed up until 2 in the morning Friday night watching my new favorite movie that I had to share with them after I saw it a few weeks ago, Funny Girl.  I feel dumb not having seen it, and if you haven’t you need to.  But anyway – the garage sale.

The four of us (three selling things and one of my friend’s sisters) woke up at 6, got ready, showered up, ate breakfast, and were setting up by 7.  We had about eight long tables and five round tables.  We used every single one of them, plus put a lot of stuff on the ground.  It really was a huge sale.

It looked like this in the beginning

We had everything set up not only by type but by person so we could easily separate our things after the sale.  All our things were marked with our initials so we could split up the money at the end of the sale.

Kitchen Stuff

Bags/Linens

Toys/Electronics/Miscellaneous items

Tons of my books

By the end of the first day we had sold over $300 worth of stuff, but our sale still looked like this:

We packed everything back up and did it all again the next day.  The first day made us so exhausted that we didn’t even feel like carrying on a second day, especially since it was Sunday and Father’s Day.  We didn’t think about those things when we planned the date.  Plus, it was supposed to rain so we had to set up differently.

We put half of the stuff in the garage and the other half in the back of the house on the patio.  We put a sign at the end of the driveway so garage salers who drive by to scope out a sale didn’t scoff at ours.

We only had about six bunches of people stop and we only made about $45.  It was worth it, though because it became sunnier and we got rid of more things.  We just wanted everything gone, so we cut prices in half (when they brought them up to us – it would have taken forever to re-price everything).

At the end of the sale, I made about $130, minus the $7 I spent on two pairs of pants my friend was selling.  I was happy, although I still had a lot of stuff left:

But look at how many boxes were left over (and that doesn’t show how many items that weren’t boxed I sold):

I basically sold a car full of stuff, and not just any car, but my long wagon that can fit a ton.  It felt so good to have those things gone, and the best part was that I couldn’t even remember what I had sold.  It must not have been that important to me, huh?

Tomorrow I will go over what I learned from this experience with some tips and things to be prepared for the next time you have a garage sale.  Some will be funny, some sad, so stay tuned!

If you’ve had a sale, shout out how much you made!  Do you think I did okay?