everything must go

Last Saturday Alex and I participated in the annual University Village yard sale. We got a flyer in our mailbox last Tuesday telling us that we could just show up on the big lawn at the Village entrance and sell our stuff. As luck would have it not only did we have lots of stuff to sell, but we were free that day.

About a month ago Alex and I had actually gone through a lot of our old boxes of junk and put a box together of things we wanted to sell... figuring we would sell it with our furniture when we move out of the Village next year. But that box was just the tip of the iceberg. Upon receiving the flyer I transformed into a madwoman stumbling from room to room finding everything which could earn the title "clutter". I opened cabinets, I searched the bottom of closets, I contemplated letting some of the furniture go, you know, like the couch. I even broke a few things in my frenzied search, which I didn't mind too much, because then I was able to throw those broken things away. An even quicker (but not as lucrative) way to get rid of the junk. I calmed down after I broke a glass and had to confess to a chuckling Alex all about my reign of terror over the clutter.

By the end of the week I had a nice pile going and I was ready to SELL. The night before the yard sale I made a desperate attempt to find anything else to get rid of. I heard a lot of "we're going to sell that?", and the answer was always yes. There was no turning back.

On Saturday morning at 8:00am we thought about carrying our things less than a mile to the location of righteous selling but after packing 2 bags and 3 boxes we ended up loading the car. The seats had to be pushed down, the entire hatchback was full. We were ready to roll with a trusty change box and wad of ones.

Before we were even halfway through with unloading the car people started asking us how much certain items were. Most interest in the very early morning went to a portable CD radio and CD walkman. As I was taking the last few items out of the car Alex was taking our first 10 bucks. An awesome sight to behold.

We had a lot of questions to answer for the first hour because Alex and I didn't think ahead of time to actually get stickers so we started pricing everything up with sharpie marked sticky notes, which conveniently blew off in the morning breeze. I had to run back home and get tape. I am not a good runner.

We ended up making around $200, which is more than I expected, considering our highest priced item was 15$. That was a telescope, which I had forgotten how to use and Alex had never used. The weird thing about that telescope is we couldn't sell it for the first few hours because we didn't know how to work it. But Alex spent a little quality time with it, figured out how to get it working around 10:30am and it was sold at 10:45am. The power of knowledge is quite useful when selling things.

to sum up my experience here are some things I learned while at my very first yard sale:
* I am terrible at practical math
* it's probably a good idea to have a price determined before beginning haggling
* people will pay for a 7 dollar item with nickels
* whenever a kid asks "how many cents is this?" you should just let them have it for as many cents as they have in their hand minus a dime
* sunblock... it's not just for the beach
* people will ask you to break a hundred dollar bill when purchasing a one dollar item.
* price all items at home, and use something with adhesive
* don't count your money in the wind