Garage Sale Half Fail

All week long we've been preparing for our big garage sale. We've sorted through box after box, room after room, pile after pile. Its been 6 hideous days of exhausting humidity and wizardous spiders that seem to *POOF* form out of the tiniest of dust particles. I don't think either of us managed to skip a sorting beat without forming a sweat puddle beneath our feet. It, sucked.

Come Saturday morning though, we were ready. Listings had been posted on both Craigslist and the Abilene yard sales Yahoo group. Things were neatly set into place, merchandise, signs, and sellers. We sat back, and waited.

We used sticky notes as our tool of choice. Neon colored ones, of course. We labeled what was for sale, and what wasn't for sale. Sometimes we triple labeled, what wasn't for sale. But no matter how many electric blue colored square pieces of paper we taped to the back wall, or to Eleanore's clearly marked play house, people kept asking us how much we wanted for the things that we in fact had not planned on selling.


If you'll notice, the kids were not wearing any kind of price tag. Or, any kind of non price tag. That's because they were free. Halfway potty trained and just learning how to crawl... I wonder why nobody took them off our hands?

And how'd it go, you wonder? FAIL. We made more money during the previous week of preparations, posting things online for the locals, than we did the actual day of the sale. Having a garage sale on base, on a small base at least, is a recipe for failure. Our total earnings from the last week, including today, just a little over $200 (all of which is going towards getting new clothes for our near naked Sasquatch babies). Not bad, not bad. But, as you can see from picture number one, we're still loaded with things that need to find new homes to go live in. We've got bags and bags of clothes that little babies should be wearing, shoes that wish they were walking around on the dry grasses of somebody elses front yard, and a toaster oven that I got for Christmas 7 years ago that wants nothing more than to live in a house where it can indulge in gluten every once in a while. Poor things.

Should I have taken $5 from the cranky lady with the ponytail, for the bag of 30+ pieces of newborn baby girl clothes? I couldn't. Not for just $5. Knowing that I'm going to have another child someday, and maybe someday that child might be a girl, I'd always think back to the very moment in which I sold an entire newborn wardrobe for the price of a single onesie? ...*sigh*. Yeah, I'm that person. Not always a bad thing, but it sure didn't help make cranky lady's day.

We're going to continue putting things up online until we get an email back with a definite "I want that!" for as many items as possible. Our prices are about as low as they can go, for going so low. We'll donate certain things to the Airman's Attic (a big room on base full of goodies, for un wealthy Military folk like ourselves, to pick up at no charge), and give things away as gifts the way that those same things were given to us (I'm not going to lie, I'm guilty of selling a gift or two, and giving away something that we've payed money for ourselves, we get it mixed up sometimes), but we've still got a small consignment shops worth of things in the cement hut attached to our house that we're going to put up a fight to sell. The great battle of Herman Crap Against Money, starts now.