by Tricia
I wasn’t planning to have our garage sale this weekend. As of Wednesday last week, all of the weathermen were forecasting rain for Saturday and I didn’t even want to chance it if there was rain in the forecast. Well, on Thursday, the weathermen started saying that it would be sunny all day!
I worked really hard to get as much stuff done as I could so we could at least have a sale yesterday to start getting rid of things. I was up until almost 3 a.m. on Friday night and got up at 6:30 a.m. on Saturday morning. We started setting up around 7 a.m., thinking it would take an hour or so to get everything set up.
Boy, was I ever wrong.
We weren’t ready to go until close to 10 a.m.!! The sheer amount of what we had was overwhelming. We were scrambling trying to figure out more tables because what we had wasn’t enough. I ended up turning over boxes and setting them down for makeshift displays. And some items stayed in tubs because we ran out of room.
It was insane. I always thought that we didn’t have a lot to show for our debt. Looking across our sale I see what definitely contributed to it. Too much STUFF!!!
By 2:30 p.m., traffic slowed down to a trickle so we decided to close up shop. The last few visitors we told them 1/2 off so they lingered around a little longer and ended up buying more. Still, we had so much left.
Once everything was packed back up and brought back into the house (that took a good hour and a half to do!), I sat down and counted the money to see how we did. I wasn’t expecting too much because we weren’t open for the hard core garage salers. We also didn’t sell anything that was over $5.00.
I was so amazed to see that we made $200.90. I’m not sure what a great take is for a garage sale, but to us…that is a lot. The last one we had we only made $65 and one year we made $350 (but $250 of that was for a bass guitar that I sold). It is the biggest take we have ever made and we still have so much stuff left!
We will definitely be having another sale once we can figure out how to have more tables so we can make sure everything can be displayed. I also plan on waking up super-early next time because I know how important presentation is. It bothered me that alike things were not together so I want to remedy that problem next time.
I learned a lot from this sale, so I know we will do better next time. I also realized how exhausting a sale of this size really is. I went to bed at 9:30 p.m. last night. I’m barely ever in bed before midnight. When I woke up this morning around 7:30 a.m., I felt like I slept like a log. I barely ever drink alcohol now, but the way I slept felt like how I used to sleep after a night of heavy drinking (during my first year of college). You hit the bed and konk right out and sleep for 10-12 hours without stirring.
Today, I was back at it with getting more stuff ready for the next garage sale. When that will be, I’m not sure. I think I’m playing it by ear and watching the weather forecasts. I want to be ready for the next one and have a much better sale so I’m working on it now rather than later.
As for what I learned? I’ll be writing about that this week.
