Another Productive Weekend

Most of the three-day weekend we lounged around. We watched the Season Finale of Blacklist and then binge-watched the first 7 episodes of Stranger Things. But I also got a lot of work done in the basement. We're getting an adjustable king-size bed so I needed to make room downstairs to store our queen-size bed. I still have some more work to do...but at least now we have room for the bed. :) We also did some spring cleaning in the kitchen. Johnny pulled out the stove and vacuumed and cleaned the floor and everything! I also did a little bit of purging and reorganizing on the counter and in the cabinets. Always a work in progress! We also sprayed around the cabinet under the sink and along the edges in the kitchen for ants and bugs. We do it about once a year. And of course I vacuumed and did laundry and got all the other normal chores done. :P 

I've also been working on my Etsy shop and trying to decide what direction I want to take it. I've been considering offering POD in my Etsy shop, so I've been researching that a lot. I don't think that's what I want to do right now though. I am planning to start offering sublimation transfer prints soon. I'd like to get a thermal label printer at some point to make printing shipping labels more convenient. Before I can print labels at all, I'll need to figure out the issues with our regular printer that we bought a few years ago. I don't know if it's just trying to die on us or if it just needs some maintenance. I'd like to get another (smaller) Epson EcoTank printer. That'll be a little while though. I'm also planning to start designing planner sticker printables...and I'd like to start offering printed sticker kits in the future but I will probably wait until I get a new printer to start doing that. 

I also have an idea of products that I will start making in the future to offer in my Etsy shop. It isn't something that I've found many people already offering on Etsy...and none the way that I plan to. So I'm pretty excited about that. But there are a lot of details that I need to hammer out first and some work that I need to do before I can make that vision a reality. But...I'm really excited for the future of CandiMaker! :) 

Another busy weekend!

This past weekend wasn't quite as busy as garage sale weekend...but it felt busy. It was at least a productive weekend. On Saturday I spent all day working in the basement. The night before the garage sale, Aubry came over and finished sorting and packing all the stuff in her room. She and a friend of hers got a small storage unit and they were able to take some of her stuff over there. So this weekend I worked on taking down the bed and the desk and getting the rest of the stuff out of her room. Then I moved almost all of the boxes of my mother-in-law's stuff into Aubry's closet. If the closet was just a little bit bigger I could've fit all of them...just needed one more row. 

I also moved all the cat stuff into Aubry's room too...their food and water bowls, litterbox, cat tree, etc. Then I moved the gate that we had at the top of the stairs to the door of Aubry's room. The dogs have been barking at the cats at the top of the stairs so I wanted to remove that "tension spot" as much as possible. It's really working out a lot better. Even without the gate, Bozley has no desire to go down the stairs...but Nova loves going down there. It's actually giving Nova and the cats some time to get to know each other without Bozley around. Boz and Nova tend to get each other worked up and being that excited makes the cats just want to hide. But when Bozley isn't around, Nova is a lot more calm and she will just sit or lay down and watch the cats from the other side of the gate. She goes down to check on them every once in awhile and then comes back upstairs. So it's nice that Leo and Angel are able to get to know Nova in a more calm manner than when Bozley is around. Hopefully Leo and Angel will start to feel comfortable enough to come upstairs again eventually. I mean...they seem content downstairs, we just miss seeing them more often. :) 

I also took apart our big dining room table Saturday and took it downstairs. It's a tall, hexagon shaped table and took up a lot of room. It's nice for big family dinners, but we only have those maybe once or twice a year anymore. So on Sunday, my parents brought over my grandma's dining room table. It's a smaller round table that has a couple leaves that we can use to expand the table when we have dinners. Grandma decided the table and chairs were just too heavy for her to move around while cleaning and everything so she has a lighter table now and we have a smaller table. :) And the wood of the new table matches our cabinets and floor better than the darker hexagon table we had. The only thing that's taking some time to get used to is the fact that the table seems so short compared to our old one! :P But it really looks good in the space and I think we'll really like the extra room. 

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I finally got all the stuff left over from the garage sale put into the plastic bins...at least the items small enough to fit in the bins. I still need to finish going through the basement AND decide where I'm going to store the bins (the basement or the garage) but I'll start working on that after I take a break. I'm way too tired and sore to work on it right now. :P It's one of those things where my mind is all, "Ooh this sounds like a good idea!" And then the next day (or week) my body is like, "Why are you so dumb?" LOL. But...now that all the stuff we sold or got rid of in the garage sale is out of the way, at least I have more room to work in the basement and the garage to sort and organize what's left. I am going to have to do it soon though...because we'll have to figure out what to do with our queen-size bed because we're going to be getting a king-size adjustable bed soon. :) 

In other news, Ashlyn has started training for her new job! She's just worked a couple days so far and then next week she'll start her actual job. This is her first payroll job and she seems to be enjoying it so far. :) 

I'm sad that the season finales of our shows are coming up or have already aired. We watched NCIS last night and the Law & Order SVU and Organized Crime season finales aired last week. Then Friday night we have the Blacklist season finale. BUT...one nice thing is that several other shows that we watch are starting up again. Season 4 of Stranger Things is being released Friday so we'll binge watch that after Blacklist. And then In the Dark starts again in about two weeks. I think The Boys has a third season being released next week. I was hoping Manifest would come back over the summer...but I think that won't be until late fall or something. But...you know...first world problems. :P 

It was a loooong week.

This past weekend was the citywide garage sale. It was very successful!

The weekend before I started working on getting everything ready and pricing stuff. Thursday we went to my storage unit to go through everything there. I'd forgotten what I had in there...which apparently was everything from the last garage sale we had in 2014. :P There were boxes upon boxes upon boxes of clothes in there...on top of the 10 plastic bin of clothes (plus some more clothes that didn't fit in those bins) that I had at home that I'd just priced! There was just SO MANY CLOTHES. So, we loaded up my grandma's truck and my dad's truck to bring everything out to my house. We also got a canopy that my dad had gotten from the school (they were just throwing it away because the track team had gotten new ones) which was definitely amazing and provided us some much needed shade...because it was pretty hot out. We also had an extension cord and a fan so that also helped a lot. I'd also made chicken salad Thursday evening so we'd have something to eat for lunch that could be eaten cold.  

I tried to organize everything as much as possible Thursday night to make Friday morning move more smoothly. I ended up not getting to bed until almost 3am. I set my alarm to wake up by 5:30am but...I woke up to my mom ringing the doorbell at 6:01am. :P But we got right to work setting up. We had four long tables and a card table. We'd planned to hang the shirts up, but our original idea for that fell through. So we hung up the dresses but actually ended up just leaving the shirts in the bins and boxes. Luckily, they were all organized by size and I think that helped a lot. Then everything else was either spread out on the tables or along the driveway and sidewalk. We have a sidewalk that is basically the width of two sidewalks so we definitely took advantage of that. 

The Rotary Club "runs" the citywide garage sale. They put together a list of all the addresses and makes the list available through the local newspaper. For $10 you can be included on the list and receive a yard sign (there were 118 addresses listed this year). I wasn't 100% sure what the weather was going to be like...plus I knew we weren't going to be participating on Thursday. So I actually didn't sign up for be included in the list. But we live on a busy road so we naturally get a lot of traffic...which is also on the way to other developments where there were other garage sales. So I think a lot of people just saw our garage sale on the way to other garage sales. We are also close by a school...so that helps too. 

I price my items fairly low, because my main motivation is to get rid of as much as possible. We actually had more than one customer give us MORE than the quarter that was listed for each item because they felt it was worth more than that. I've never had that happen before! We also had a couple of girls who told us that ours was the best garage sale they'd been to of the entire day. So that was nice to hear! We did amazing on Friday. We still did well on Saturday...but since a lot had been bought, the sale looked smaller on Saturday so it didn't draw as many people in from the street. I was honestly surprised that we sold so many clothes considering people had to dig through the bins and boxes since we couldn't hang them up. In my hometown, people didn't really dig through things to look...they just browsed at whatever they could see. I was also surprised that we sold so many shoes! Aside from baby shoes, we've probably only sold less than half a dozen shoes TOTAL in all the garage sales we've ever had combined (and we used to have at least once garage sale a year when I was growing up). But with this garage sale, we sold MORE than a dozen pairs of shoes and boots. A lot of the shoes we sold were pairs that didn't sell in our previous garage sales! lol. 

We actually didn't have as much stuff put out there as I planned. We didn't get to everything in the garage or the basement...just ran out of time. And my sister wasn't able to join in the garage sale this year, either...but my mom and grandma did hang out and help with set-up, clean-up, and helping with customers. The girls helped out too and they also put some of their stuff in the garage sale to make a little extra money. Originally I told them they could only put stuff in there that they'd bought themselves...but I ended up being pretty lax on that since they did stick around and help. However, Saturday was rough. Ashlyn had to work and Aubry was kinda whiney (we were ALL tired and cranky) and she and I tend to butt heads at that point...so it made for a longer day. :P 

Saturday afternoon we started closing down around noon. We decided to start separating out a few things that I wanted to save for one last garage sale...and things that we just want to get rid of. Pretty much everything that was marked less than $1 we put out along the sidewalk and listed it as free. While we were separating things out, we still had customers coming and looking through both the free and the marked items. After we were all closed up, I left the free items out all weekend as well as today...and we've had a lot of people stop by and either pick through boxes and grab a few things or just take whole boxes full of stuff. I'm SO glad we thought to do that...because I'm NOT bringing any of it back in my house. Now I have more room to sort through the rest of the stuff in the house...and in a year or two we'll have one last huge garage sale to get rid of everything else (and hopefully it'll work out for my sister to join in next time too). And then...I'll be DONE with garage sales! :P They're always much better in theory than when it comes time to actually doing it. They're a LOT of work...and I'm still so TIRED and sore today. Ultimately, I'm glad we did it though. :)

It's already May?!

I can't believe it's already May and the school year is almost over again. Next year...our last child will be a SENIOR! It's so crazy to think that this stage of our parenting journey will officially be over after next year. Honestly, I'm looking forward to it. Don't get me wrong...we had a good run and it's been very rewarding raising my kids. They're good kids and we've had a lot of fun experiences...but raising teenagers is also exhausting. LOL. 

Ashlyn had prom last weekend! She went with some friends and had a good time. My mom, grandma, and sister came over and we all hung out, had lunch, and my sister did Ashlyn's make-up. Then we went to take pictures at the park down the road and over at my grandparents' house. Ashlyn was super excited for her surprise...prom pictures with the pony car. ;) Johnny chauffeured Ashlyn and her friend to dinner, the dance, and then back to another friend's house after the dance for a couple hours before picking her back up to bring her home. 

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The weekend before prom we had pictures with my mom, her mom, my sister, her 2 daughters, and my 2 daughters. They were four generation photos as well as pictures with our 3rd birthday dresses that my mom sewed for all of us. We love our photographer. She has been taking pictures of the little girls since Aubry was 4 months old. We need to call her again soon to set up Ashlyn's senior pictures now! 

This weekend I'm planning to work on garage sale stuff...then next weekend is the citywide garage sale. Hopefully it doesn't rain. It's been raining a lot the last several days. There were actually tornados in the area (about 10 miles away from us) the day before Ashlyn had prom. If it does end up raining next weekend...I think I'll just wait and have the garage sale next year. Garage sales are already a lot of work...I don't want to deal with rain on top of it. But regardless of when...we definitely WILL have a garage sale at some point! We have so much stuff to get rid of! I have 10+ plastic bins of clothes alone that we need to get rid of...plus some furniture, lots of housewares, stuff in the garage, etc. 

I finally got my POD shop up and running! You can find it over at RedBubble. I have about 25 designs so far and there are shirts and stickers available for every design. For some designs there are other products available including travel cups, notebooks, aprons, phone and iPad cases, clocks, bags, blankets, etc. In the future I plan to also have another POD website for printed stationary like wedding and party invitations as well as a few other products. I'm also still toying with the idea of selling physical products on Etsy...but that'll be down the road as well. Today I'm working on my Etsy design shop...reworking a few designs and updating the SEO on my listings. I try to go through my listings every couple of months to update tags, descriptions, etc. to make sure that I'm using what works and getting found in searches, etc. 

Now...back to work! :)