I guess I should write a little about the garage sale before I forget...
My mom is moving to Chicago, and she's hardly taking anything there since my dad already has a house and furniture. So she decided to have a garage sale to sell off a lot of her stuff that she's collected in the last 11 years she's lived in Provo. And oh boy, were there a lot of stuff!
Joe and I helped her get the garage sale together, and we were piling stuff on bookshelves, in the garage, and in the living room to get ready three weeks before the garage sale. We had actually planned to have the garage sale a while ago, but it had been forecasted to rain and be super cold for the last two saturdays (weather turned out to be great, by the way). So we finally had our garage sale last Saturday. We advertised it on KSL and put some signs on the streets the night before. We were a little worried that we wouldn't have a good turnout or sell a lot of stuff and only make a couple hundred dollars after working so hard to get everything ready.
We were up until midnight the night before, getting everything organized and pricing most things so they'd be ready to go out to the driveway the next morning. Saturday, Joe and I woke up at 6 am to get ready. The garage sale was supposed to start at 9 am, and we still had a lot of work to do. We had everything that was sitting in the living room, plus in the garage that had to be reorganized and priced. We also had a lot of small pieces of furniture around the house that had to be emptied and brought out. We thought 3 hours would give us enough time to get ready.
Well, at 7:15 am, the first two groups came. (sigh). We only had half the stuff out, but I had to start giving them prices and negotiate, while Joe was trying to figure out where to put stuff (I was supposed to help him with that). Anyway, the day started way earlier than we thought, and we had constant stream of people until almost 1 pm! (The garage sale was supposed to be from 9 to noon).
Thankfully, Joe's mom was there to help with the children, and babysitters came from 9 to noon as well to play with the kids. As for my mom, we purposely told her to get as far away from the house because I knew that she would just try to give away as much as possible. (She has a hard time trying to make money from people. She had already given away probably the most expensive tool we had in the garage for free to her friend).
We really were hoping to make about 3 to 400 dollars tops from the garage sale. We had a lot more people come than we thought (thank goodness for the warm weather and KSL), and even though I was giving a lot of discounts and bargains (for example, a man offered me $1 for a mallet, and I gave it to him for 50 cents), we ended up making almost $1000! Joe had to remind my mom and me about how much money had already invested into buy all that stuff in the first place, but I also reminded him that it was sunk cost and couldn't be redeemed any other way.. Anyway, it was hard but rewarding, and somewhat fun as well (Joe didn't think so. His body was aching all over the next day).
On a side note, we used the Square app on our iPad to take credit cards. A lot of older people thought we were joking and didn't take it seriously, but we didn't accept three credit card purchases. Ha ha. This one guys (looked like a BYU student) said that this was the most high-tech garage sale he'd ever been to. :D
Unfortunately, I was too busy to take any pictures, so no pictures.. sorry.
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