We decided to put the April, May and June cast offs into a multi-family yard sale. This idea has been brewing for several months – partly due to this blog and my two neighbors who follow the blog. I have mixed feelings about yard sales. On the one hand, it is nice to get a little cash for your stuff. On the other hand, etiquette goes out the window with a lot of yard salers. I understand that haggling is part of the experience and I’m fine with that. But I am not going to give the stuff away. And if I do it will be to Goodwill and not some random person who is standing in my yard arguing with me over a quarter. I also don’t like the idea that it’s cool to contact me prior to the sale to preview. The last yard sale we had several years ago, we had people coming in our driveway and peeking in our garage. Seriously, if you are that aggressive, you should be selling used cars or in multi level marketing. Your talents are wasted on yard sales.
So despite my reservations, I agreed to do this because I thought the peer pressure would encourage me and the phrase “multi-family” in front of “yard sale” tends to draw more customers. Plus this would give me someone to talk to as I stood in my front yard roasting in the heat and wondering why I subjected myself to this – again.
The week before the yard sale saw a flurry of activity at our house. The cabinets, closets and the garage were rifled through. We walked through the house again and again evaluating our artwork, furniture, clothing, etc. I also spent a sneezy night in the cobweb and dust filled garage cleaning off baby gear. I had a pretty substantial pile of stuff to put out come Saturday morning.
At 6:30 Saturday morning, I was awake and getting ready for the big day. Our ad was explicit about the start time of 8 a.m. We are not morning people and the last thing we want is to deal with is strangers before we’ve even consumed our morning caffeine. By 7:00 we were dragging stuff out in the yard. At 7:02 a woman stops by in a mini van and says “Mind if I take a look?” At this point there are empty tables and about 10 items in the yard. Plus the garage around back is wide open as is my front door. My partners in this endeavor were not even at the house yet. As politely as I could muster (without my full dose of caffeine), I replied, “We don’t have anything out yet.” She drove off to find someone else who had their shit together a little better than us on a Saturday morning. I’m not sure if she found it, but she did return about 8:30 and she spent $20 so I was glad I was polite.
Between the three households, we had a dining room set, chairs, a pie safe, a couch, end tables, a sofa table, rugs, wall art, camping chairs, patio furniture, linens, various items of clothing, toys and baby gear. Tons of baby gear. I was hoping the baby gear would be a good customer draw. It wasn’t. From my own collection, I put out three strollers, three car seats, one infant play gym, two large totes of kids clothes, two totes of toys and an awesome baby swing. I sold one stroller, one car seat, the infant play gym and about a third of the baby/toddler clothes.
I made a small addition to my mad money as did the two other moms. We didn’t have the amount of traffic that I would have hoped for but we did have a steady stream of people. We had our share of strange people but there was not a lot of haggling. For the most part people were willing to pay what we asked. And we were happy to give up a few dollars to move an item. As for the leftovers, the baby stuff can go to consignment and still bring a buck. The other stuff will go to Goodwill. My intention was to take it straight from the yard to the Goodwill but we did not get to do that after the sale because the rain moved in right as we were wrapping up. We were all scrambling to get the stuff put away and get the kids inside for their naps.
I’m glad that I did this but I will not be doing it again for at least another five years. Once or twice a decade is fine with me.
