My eyes hurt and my back is feeling taut as a high wire. It was nice to finally be able to sit on the couch and count up our earnings. We were up at 5:00 a.m. setting things out for the day’s garage sale. We had a ton of small stuff, incidental things that we were just hoping to clear out of the way. We put signs up around the neighborhood yesterday and posted the sale on Craigslist with a start time of 8:00 a.m. and specifically forbidding any ‘early birds’. We set up two racks of metal shelving and five folding tables and started piling on our wares. The first car pulled up around 6:00 and the shoppers began rummaging through our stuff while we still trying to get it out of boxes. It was still dark, the moon was high and people were showing up. We pretty much expected it, so didn’t get too torqued about the interruption of our preparations. People starting coming in droves from 6:30 until about 11:00. The inventory was flying off of the shelves. In fact, the shelves were flying off of the shelves as they were both gone by 8:30.

We sold mostly small things; lots of patio furniture, camping gear, bike stuff, plant pots and lots of miscellaneous household stuff. A couple of ladies were almost coming to blows over who got to the sauce pan first. They were going back and forth in Spanish and the one low-balling shopper couldn’t let it go. She made a special trip back to the driveway after loading her car to give the supposedly offending lady a final piece of her mind. We had a pretty interesting mix of local neighborhood housewives, guys looking for fishing gear I didn’t have and a lot of Spanish speaking shoppers who allowed me to get in some practice on my language skills. You never know what is going to sell. The things we thought were sure winners were still there when the day was done and some of things we were certain were destined for the Amvets truck on Monday were gone in a flash.

One woman got her feet tangled in a bedspread that had gotten tossed out of a box and she hit the ground pretty hard. It was a bit of a scare, but she was quite resilient and popped right back up. I felt obliged to give her the family discount on the remainder of her purchases and she looked okay to me when she left. Many of the neighbors passed through, more to say hello than to make any significant purchases. We made some new friends and another neighbor wants to team up for the next sale. So, all in all, it was an enjoyable day and we got rid of a lot of stuff.

It took almost as long to clean up as it did to get the event set up. I took tons of pictures of higher end items that I will place on E-bay because garage sale pricing just wasn’t going to cut it. We let a lot of things go dirt cheap, but figured better to get a few bucks than to be packing it back up at the end of the day. So, after an eleven hour day starting at 5, it proved well worth the effort with a net gain of nearly $900.00 and a garage that now boasts a bit more room to maneuver about. Now for the second round of sorting and accumulating and we’ll probably do the whole thing again in a few weeks.