How To Have a Garage Sale
As you can see I’m a little behind in blogging – all due to preparing for a garage sale!! I grew up in a family that had garage sales – one almost every summer it seemed when we were young. When my sister-in-law, Wendy, mentioned that she had a lot of items to donate, I suggested to her that we do a garage sale instead! She agreed with the idea and I was excited to RUN with it! There is just something about garage sales. One night Dan asked me “why do you enjoy doing garage sales so much?” I thought for about 2 seconds and realized that even though my answer may sound a little selfish, I love them because they bring me satisfaction. Satisfaction for a couple of reasons.
#1 – I LOVE to keep things organized. When a space gets a tad cluttered, I know it’s time to either get rid of something or relocate it. Usually it comes down to get rid of something. Garage sales aid in that process. I don’t think we have a lot of “stuff,” but there are still things we have that we don’t need.
#2 – Satisfaction is found when you see someone’s face light up because of a deal or an item that they fell in love with. When I put something in a garage sale, I do it because I personally don’t want it anymore. BUT, when someone else finds joy in that item, that makes a garage sale all worth it!
#3 – Garage sales offer a way to make money. I put that as my last reason because if you go into a garage sale thinking that you are going to make tons and tons of money, you might be setting yourself up for disappointment. Of course the reason you are having a garage sale IS to make money, but if you don’t meet your desired goal, you can’t be too heartbroken.
Let’s be honest – garage sales take work. To me though, the satisfaction of them is SO worth the work! I decided to do a little “How To” on garage sales – maybe someday you will find yourself having one of your own! Thankfully I remembered more than I thought I would about my mom’s garage sales, which was a huge help!
Step 1: Where to begin? The thought of where to start is probably overwhelming as you look at your house. I would recommend starting with ONE room at a time. This made the process of pulling items out to sell, MUCH easier! Before I knew it, I had a room full of things to get rid of – though I didn’t even know we had that much to sell! Some things to keep in mind when pulling items to donate or sell – could someone benefit from the item more than me? Is the room that it is taking up, worth it? When is the last time I used this item? Will I be glad when it’s gone? Just some questions to ponder…
Step #2 – Pricing, pricing, pricing. This is probably the most daunting task of them all. Yes it takes awhile to price everything, but it’s worth it to make the price clear. You don’t want someone to NOT buy an item b/c they are unsure of the price. Here are some ideas in pricing:
– make deals, like the one I did for my valances (picture below).
– make the last day of your sale, “1/2 off everything.”
– price things to sell; what would YOU pay for an item? Often times I think people expect the buyer/shopper to have the same emotional/sentimental attachment as we do to an item. It’s really never the case. So, price accordingly.
– you aren’t having a garage sale to make a million dollars. The reason you are having it is to get rid of items – so, again, price accordingly.
– you can buy yard sale stickers, or I just used masking tape w/ a sharpie marker
Step #3 – Organizing your items. This takes work too, but once you get started, it all falls together. We organized our items by category; for instance, books, clothes, house decor, cds, etc.
Here are a few thoughts on organizing:
– put items that you think will sell well in obvious spots
– don’t clutter your tables too much that the piles fall over when people go through them
– put kid’s books in a box so that they can file through them (along with cds as well)
– put adult books spine up and all in the same direction, so that everyone can read the title quickly
– Put large items on the ground
Step #4 – Decide on a location and the best set up. Wendy offered to have it at their house b/c they have a garage (in case it rained), they had way more stuff, and in the city where we live, you have to get a permit. Their house was perfect because it was in a great location where other garage sales were also going on. As you can see, we put larger items on the ground to draw people. We put the toy table closest to the garage (back of the sale) so that kids would go straight there and parents therefore had to follow. It made them see everything we had to offer.
Step #5 – Advertisting! To be honest, we didn’t want to spend money on advertising, so I went online and found two free websites to advertise the garage sale on (one being www.yardsalesearch.com). I made homemade signs with white posterboard, a large permanent marker, and wire that Wendy had. You really can’t have too many signs :). Some signs I made with the hours of the sale and the address, but some (like the one below) I made simple so that we can just have an arrow pointing to the right direction. We also chose not to advertise in the newspaper because it costs money. Of course not advertising in the paper has it’s disadvantages, but we thought it best not too b/c we knew we didn’t have a lot of high-priced items, where we were going to make a ton.
Dan and I had an old clothes rack downstairs that we thought we’d NEVER use (it was left by the old lady who lived – and actually died – in the house before us).
We priced our books at $1.00 for a hardback and $.50 for paperbacks. That made pricing VERY easy – all I did was make a sign!
Step #6 – HAVE FUN! It was AWESOME doing this all with Wendy (and my brother in law, Mike) because we just sat and talked all day, I played with their youngest boy Malachi who is 5 months old, and plus, we had great weather to just be outside. We made about $160!!! We were pleased!!! We thought, if we could make $100, we would be happy – but we made $160 for Wendy and their family! To me, that was a garage sale well worth it!
