Garage Sale Post-Mortem: By the Numbers

So happy . . .

It’s over!

The never-again garage sale is over.

And after all that carrying on I did, I have to admit it went so well!

By the numbers:

• Days involved—about 2 days of hard-core preparation, focused on making items presentable, setting up tables, pricing, and “merchandising.” The sale itself lasted 1 very busy evening from 4-7, 1 exhausting day from 8-3, and 1 mellow morning from 8-noon.
• Perfect weather—5 days, for set-up and sale—bright sunshine, low humidity, temps in the 70s. If I could be guaranteed this weather, I might have a garage sale every year!
• Time the first people showed up for the 4 o’clock sale—11 a.m.
• Time the same people came back for the 4 o’clock sale—3 p.m.
• Time I finally relented and let them all in—3:55 p.m.
• Shoppers—hundreds. Everyone who made it to our house, at the end of the road, talked about the traffic and congestion and throngs/hordes/droves of people!
• Items sold—hundreds, proving the maxim that, “one person’s trash is another’s treasure”!
• Items sold that gave me pause—a few. My grandmother’s old bed. A beautiful rocker from the farm. A couple of vintage sewing cases. It helped that the buyers seemed to love what they got!
• Money made—closer to $1000 than $500.
• Clean-up time—less than 1 hour; so easy because we had so little left!
• Leftovers—1 box of books, 4 boxes of odds and ends, all to be donated.
• Back in the garage—1 old chair, 3 larger antiques that I’ll put on Craigslist.
• Favorite moments—1. A woman from a couple miles away, who has her own big sale every year, pointed at my little porch glider (not for sale) and announced loudly, “THAT’S what I’m looking for!” To which I answered, “I bought that from you last year!” I really did . . .
• Free time—Not a lot, except on Sunday morning. I spent that time going through boxes of damaged linens that I’ve accumulated, to decide what could be thrown away, what could be recycled into rag rugs (if I ever go that direction with weaving), and what could be cut up to use in other projects. I started thinking about a quilt that would incorporate pretty fragments, especially monograms, from damaged items. I winnowed 5 plastic bins into 1½.

It was a three-day whirlwind. We ate on the fly, gave garden tours, chatted with neighbors, made sure no one took off with our friendly cats, shooed the neighbor kids away. I dug up a piece of my hops vine to send home with a shopper.

We haggled (not really—we gave great prices!), we laughed, we lamented missing out on the sales down the road.

I didn’t get to the neighbor’s for one of her Michigans. I went to only one other sale, after we had closed ours, but I did score some old linens!

So, it’s over. It was more fun than I expected, more profitable than I anticipated, and we divested ourselves of more stuff than I could’ve hoped.

If fact, it went so smoothly I haven’t even felt the need to exclaim “never again.” But I will say, “No time soon!”