Garage Sale

What a busy couple of weeks we have had! Since we moved into the new house a year ago last month, we finally decided it was time to sell some of our "non-usables" in a garage sale. If you have never had a garage sale, let me tell you... it is a chore to get ready! I have had many over the years and I tend to think I have it down to an art!

PRICING:
First, I have been collecting items since the move. I price every item as I put it in the GARAGE SALE box. (This makes it TONS faster on you when you decide to have a sale). I use bright neon stickers for most items and then on clothing and hard to sticker items I make hang tags.

**How to make a cheap hang tag**
Use brightly colored paper (I use scraps of old scrapbook paper) punch a hole in the corner, write the item description and the price, and hang with some curly ribbon or on clothing I use a safety pin.

You ask why I write the description on it?? Well, after many successful sales, I have found people to change prices on items. I know, I know, it's just a garage sale, but why would I want to get $4 for a Coach purse that I had marked $50. Also, I think it extremely important to have every item priced. Nothing is worse than a non-priced item. I also don't like the "make me an offer" gimmick. I don't want to insult someone nor do I want to under price something that someone would have paid more for or vise-versa.

GATHERING:
We, meaning the hubby and I, started working on the sale 3 weeks prior to our big sale day. We would scour the house and garage for items to sell, price it and set it out in the garage.

We hung clothes on the rack as we priced them

Look at all the goodies we gathered!

My "work station" Everything was priced and inspected here. I made sure to fix any broken items, or insure that they worked via batteries or plug.

SET-UP:
I divided all of our items into like categories. All the kitchen items on one table, Christmas on another, household goods on one, baby on another, etc. It was like browsing at a store!! This makes it much easier to find something when someone asks if you have a specific item.

I staged the garage with the tables set up the night before the sale. When Friday morning rolled all we had to do was roll out the tables and place everything on the driveway.

Baby table

Notice the blankets and sheets in the background? We did this to hide our stuff that wasn't for sale.

See the sign in the background? We attached flags to it, to blow in the wind, as if all the stuff on the driveway wasn't a big enough eye catcher!! :)

We even had a 4 wheeler for sale!

More clothes on the much used racks

We had a display case for the sunglasses and we also had it for sale!

The overall display of our items

DATE AND TIME:
We chose a gorgeous fall day for our sale and made sure that our State football team (OU Sooners) played a night game on Saturday and that it wasn't the same time as our Sate Fair. Both of these events would have put a damper on things. We opened the doors at 7AM and closed them around 6PM each night. We had people non-stop the whole time!

SIGNS:
I don't take a picture of our signs, but I made them on NEON orange poster board and in big letters wrote GARAGE SALE--->
I taped them to some realtor signs that we had laying around. This is much easier than taping signs to a pole, and they stand up high off the ground. Our street intersects with a major city street, so we had LOTS of exposure with our signs.

FYI:
We had so much stuff, I was concerned that we wouldn't be able to sell it all. So, here was my master plan: EVERYTHING that was left at 1PM on Saturday was 1/2 off the marked price!!! I made another sign to put by my original sign... and boy did I open the flood gates! We had people standing in line to pay! We were slinging money and bags full of goodies faster than I ever expected. I will definitely do that again if I have another sale (hopefully not anytime soon!!!)

Overall we had a fabulous sale, we made over $3,500 and got rid of lots of clutter! After the 1/2 off sale, we only had 3 plastic totes of items left! I donated them to Good Will and got my tax slip. It feels good to declutter and make some money at the same time! We were too exhausted by the end of the weekend to clean up and organize the garage, so that was put off until the next weekend. Next blog post will be the new cleaned out garage!

Hopefully you can take a tip or two from me and have a successful garage sale too!!

XOXO-