Saturday, May 19, 2007

Yard Sale Day

Daniel and I have been talking about having a yard sale since we moved here in March. This weekend I finally threw one together. Literally.

I'm aware that there are women who carefully plan their yard sale for days or more. They set aside in a certain place all the things they plan to sell, collecting them over weeks. Then they carefully label everything and sort children's clothing by sizes. I'm not that lady. She wouldn't be friends with someone like me either.

No, I decide to have a yard sale Thursday night and Friday morning I get up and start tossing stuff out side. I frantically rummage through all our closets, tear the house apart as I shove things off the furniture I've suddenly decided to sell, and stick up one big sign with generic prices on it: All kids clothes 50 cents! All books a quarter! At our last yard sale in Oklahoma we put up a big sign that said "Everything 25 cents!".

It seems to work. We make good money and sell most of our stuff. I've been to yard sales where people price everything high. I know they would probably lower it a little if I'd haggle with them, but I prefer to just start with a low price and pay it. So if their stuff is high priced, I leave. As we were preparing to pack up today after our second and last day of the yard sale, a man came in and bought all our remaining kids' clothes. He resells them in Mexico apparently. Yesterday a lady bought two big trash bags full of my old clothes. I made $50 from that one sale! The only negative was today we didn't get many customers so we made less money. We found out later that all our signs had been stolen, so we were only getting customers who happened to drive by. Otherwise, everything went really well.

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