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. :)