The big sale
Today was the garage sale, and I am wiped out. What a day! It feels like it was forever ago that we woke up and started putting things out.
All in all, I'd say the sale was a huge success despite a few minor snaffoos. We got rid of everything big, although we got pretty desperate at the end and started slashing prices, and we netted $367.50, which is more than we anticipated making for sure.
But there were a few things that could have gone better for sure…some our fault, some not our fault.
The number one thing that we didn’t do that we seriously erred in judgement on was to wake up at seven am and get started instead of six. We put out signs last night that our sale was starting at nine am this morning, and thought for sure that two hours would have been enough time to get everything out there and ready. We were right thinking that two hours was enough…what we were wrong in was advertising that it starts at nine. People were driving by at 7:30 ogling the stuff that we had out, and by eight, we were beating them off with a stick. We finally gave in and just started the sale early and kept pulling stuff out from the kitchen and throwing it on sheets, but because it was SO crowded and SO crazy, one of us had to stay up at the front monitoring the sale and taking money and the other had to pull stuff out. P was the better one to stay up front since he speaks much better Spanish than I do and the majority of our clientele was Hispanic and very skilled garage salers (ie, hagglers), so I hustled as much as I could and pulled stuff out. But we didn’t pull some of the stuff out of the garage on time and completely forgot about our breakfast nook table until about 10 am.
We also realized at the end of the sale when we were packing up that we had a thief in our midst. We had a Dirk Nowitski bobblehead out that we were going to try to sell for about $10, and we realized at the end of the day that neither one of us remembered selling it to anyone. Someone must have waited until we were both very distracted and slipped it into their bag. Oh, well. Live and learn. Why someone would steal that, I have NO idea.
I also forgot to put on sunscreen OR wear a hat, so I’m now sitting here in my robe typing this with a Noxema mask on to cut the burn. Nice.
But everything big sold. The breakfast nook table was the last thing to go and we ended up having to throw our matching chairs in with it to get it to sell. We now have no dining room chairs. But it’s all good…we wanted to buy four matching ones anyway. We sold our living room coffee table, my old stereo from when I was in high school, our VCR, our TV/VCR combo, our baker’s rack, and our patio umbrella within the first two hours, and a LOT of stuff just went really fast.
The funniest part about today BY FAR was our electric range. That was the one thing that I was having trouble getting out to the front, and P couldn’t lift it either. At first he was saying, “Just put a sign out and we can show it to them in the back” but I knew if we did that, we wouldn’t sell it. So I finally went back there, lugged the thing onto a dolly and pushed it up to the front.
Arrgh, I am woman, I am STRONG!
About a hour after I did that, this little Jeep with four high school seniors drives by and one of them gets out and walks up to us. I can tell she has a purpose, so I ask her if she’s looking for something specific. She proceeds to tell us that she and her friends are participating in a church homemade go-cart race or something of that nature that night and their theme is chefs and cooking, and so they want to buy our range AND our dolly for this. We just died laughing when they told us this, but considering that no one else had even shown a glimmer of interest in it, we knew we were either faced with taking less money than we wanted or not selling it at all. A few people commented that they were worried that the range didn’t work and we had no way of hooking it up to show them that it did. So we sold it to these high school girls for $25. It was such a relief to see it go down the road.
We also had another funny moment with this woman early on who bought my pots, pans, CD rack, ten-year-old microwave and some other little things. She was eyeing my stereo system pretty intensely. I explained to her that it did work and that the only problem with it was that the second tape deck didn’t work. We wanted $20 for it. She kept trying to talk me down saying that it was old, inoperable, etcetera, but I held firm…a replacement system with materials of like kind and quality would have easily been $200, even though it was old, and it was a Sony. She haggled with P pretty strongly…and then this other guy walked by and said that he would pay full price for it. It was pretty funny…at least for us. I don’t think she was too happy.
I was really shocked that not many of our clothes sold. We sold our jeans pretty fast, but everything else, even when we started slashing prices, just sat there. And out of the six keyboards, three printers, two sets of computer speakers, two CPUs, two monitors, and numerous mice, we sold ONE printer. Oh, well. We're going to donate everything to America's Computers for Kids. Everything non-computer related is going to my in-laws to contribute to their garage sale.
Anyway, it was a big success, the kitchen is now empty again, the garage is empty, and all is well. P and I are now going to go out to dinner and celebrate!
All in all, I'd say the sale was a huge success despite a few minor snaffoos. We got rid of everything big, although we got pretty desperate at the end and started slashing prices, and we netted $367.50, which is more than we anticipated making for sure.
But there were a few things that could have gone better for sure…some our fault, some not our fault.
The number one thing that we didn’t do that we seriously erred in judgement on was to wake up at seven am and get started instead of six. We put out signs last night that our sale was starting at nine am this morning, and thought for sure that two hours would have been enough time to get everything out there and ready. We were right thinking that two hours was enough…what we were wrong in was advertising that it starts at nine. People were driving by at 7:30 ogling the stuff that we had out, and by eight, we were beating them off with a stick. We finally gave in and just started the sale early and kept pulling stuff out from the kitchen and throwing it on sheets, but because it was SO crowded and SO crazy, one of us had to stay up at the front monitoring the sale and taking money and the other had to pull stuff out. P was the better one to stay up front since he speaks much better Spanish than I do and the majority of our clientele was Hispanic and very skilled garage salers (ie, hagglers), so I hustled as much as I could and pulled stuff out. But we didn’t pull some of the stuff out of the garage on time and completely forgot about our breakfast nook table until about 10 am.
We also realized at the end of the sale when we were packing up that we had a thief in our midst. We had a Dirk Nowitski bobblehead out that we were going to try to sell for about $10, and we realized at the end of the day that neither one of us remembered selling it to anyone. Someone must have waited until we were both very distracted and slipped it into their bag. Oh, well. Live and learn. Why someone would steal that, I have NO idea.
I also forgot to put on sunscreen OR wear a hat, so I’m now sitting here in my robe typing this with a Noxema mask on to cut the burn. Nice.
But everything big sold. The breakfast nook table was the last thing to go and we ended up having to throw our matching chairs in with it to get it to sell. We now have no dining room chairs. But it’s all good…we wanted to buy four matching ones anyway. We sold our living room coffee table, my old stereo from when I was in high school, our VCR, our TV/VCR combo, our baker’s rack, and our patio umbrella within the first two hours, and a LOT of stuff just went really fast.
The funniest part about today BY FAR was our electric range. That was the one thing that I was having trouble getting out to the front, and P couldn’t lift it either. At first he was saying, “Just put a sign out and we can show it to them in the back” but I knew if we did that, we wouldn’t sell it. So I finally went back there, lugged the thing onto a dolly and pushed it up to the front.
Arrgh, I am woman, I am STRONG!
About a hour after I did that, this little Jeep with four high school seniors drives by and one of them gets out and walks up to us. I can tell she has a purpose, so I ask her if she’s looking for something specific. She proceeds to tell us that she and her friends are participating in a church homemade go-cart race or something of that nature that night and their theme is chefs and cooking, and so they want to buy our range AND our dolly for this. We just died laughing when they told us this, but considering that no one else had even shown a glimmer of interest in it, we knew we were either faced with taking less money than we wanted or not selling it at all. A few people commented that they were worried that the range didn’t work and we had no way of hooking it up to show them that it did. So we sold it to these high school girls for $25. It was such a relief to see it go down the road.
We also had another funny moment with this woman early on who bought my pots, pans, CD rack, ten-year-old microwave and some other little things. She was eyeing my stereo system pretty intensely. I explained to her that it did work and that the only problem with it was that the second tape deck didn’t work. We wanted $20 for it. She kept trying to talk me down saying that it was old, inoperable, etcetera, but I held firm…a replacement system with materials of like kind and quality would have easily been $200, even though it was old, and it was a Sony. She haggled with P pretty strongly…and then this other guy walked by and said that he would pay full price for it. It was pretty funny…at least for us. I don’t think she was too happy.
I was really shocked that not many of our clothes sold. We sold our jeans pretty fast, but everything else, even when we started slashing prices, just sat there. And out of the six keyboards, three printers, two sets of computer speakers, two CPUs, two monitors, and numerous mice, we sold ONE printer. Oh, well. We're going to donate everything to America's Computers for Kids. Everything non-computer related is going to my in-laws to contribute to their garage sale.
Anyway, it was a big success, the kitchen is now empty again, the garage is empty, and all is well. P and I are now going to go out to dinner and celebrate!
posted by Erica at 2:07 PM
MoiraKatydid
emgonz
emgonz@msn.com
1 Comments:
Hi Erica,
Glad your sale went so well. But we really want is a new belly shot. Do you feel like giving us one of those? Also, do you ever get to stitch anymore? Noah's Sub?
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