This past weekend we invited ourselves and our junk to our neighbor's moving sale. I had spent the past couple of months periodically adding items to a growing pile in the back room: portable CD players, lots of mugs, duplicate measuring cups, books we'll never read again, toys not worth saving, 500 million highlighters.
By last Thursday, things were looking a little chaotic. And surveying the wreckage made us wonder, "Why did we need all this stuff and where the heck did we put it before?" Not to mention, "Will anyone want any of this crud?"
This is in the middle of the pricing/ organizing phase. Yes, this is organized.
This is what the driveway looked like on Friday when I drove off to work, leaving poor Heidi and her mom and grandmother to wheel and deal for us. I did make one sale on Friday morning: 3 tiki torches and the fuel to go with them for $3. Luckily, the point was to get rid of it all, and so every sale they made -- and almost 75% of everything was sold by the end of the day -- was cause for a little celebration. (Well, for us anyway. Every sale they made was for them one less sale they had to make.)
This is our half of the driveway. Heidi's side also included her garage. Lucky folks, the ones that got here early and got the pick of the litter.
On Saturday, we reached for desperate measures by setting up a dime table, a quarter table, and half price table. And a "FREE! Please take it! Please please PLEASE!" pile. At the end of it all we were each left with only a few boxes, and a pile o' cash. One very special bottle of wine, coming up!
The whole experience left me with the feeling I originally had: garage sales are a lot of work and not much fun. (A)You need to have a lot of stuff to make it worthwhile. And (B)You should either pay someone to do it for you (a REALLY good idea, in-laws-of-mine), or just give the junk away.
But we will very very much enjoy our bottle of the good stuff.
