We finally did it. Our family’s first garage sale. The kids have always wanted one but I’ve never been patient enough to gather all of our treasures (crap!) together at the same time and then WAIT until the big day to carry it all out into our front yard. It’s just so much easier to clean out one room and take all of the unwanted, neglected toys to our local thrift shop right then.
My house was was long over due for spring cleaning. It was exploding with stuffed animals . . . in the storage closet, toy boxes, kids’ closets, beds, floors. I finally decided I wasn’t willing to store Jack’s frog collection or Ryan’s monkey collection indefinitely, until they had their own children. I came up with a plan. They could keep all of the money from their stuffed animal sales if they would let me sell them. They chose their favorites and kept a close eye on the remaining ones throughout the day.
Ryan made one last quick look for any monkeys he wanted to keep after someone tried to buy his beloved “Cha Cha”.
It was a fun experience but I would never do it again. It was so much work and preparation to get all this stuff together and presentable. Garage sale people are only looking for steals and don’t want to pay more than $2 for anything. We ended up spending more money on batteries for the toys than we made on the toy. We still had a lot of stuffed animals left over. I ended up buying them for $.50 each from Jack and Ryan so I could take them to the DI. They walked over to the grocery store and spent all of their earnings on chips, drinks and gum. We ended up making around $150 which surprised me since most things sold for $.50 to $1. And the best part of having a garage sale? I was finally forced to clean out the toy room, storage room and closets!
7 comments:
Wow, lots of good "stuff" :-) My Greta (6) would've loved coming to your house to buy 1/2 of everything. :-) Our CC&R's won't allow for garage sales, so we have to give everything away. Definitely easier, but you came away with $150. That's great :-)
Wow, good for you! It IS an awful lot of work! We did it once, and now again have a huge pile of *stuff* in the basement just waiting to find a new home. I say Craigslist, my husband says thrift store. I think the thrift store idea is probably the way to go...
shoot - should have let me know! looks like there was a lot of cute girl stuff!
Does make me a little sad though, you know, like Toy Story 2 :)
Wow! I thought we had a lot of stuffed animals. Not even close to you guys:) Looks like it was fun!
I cannot bring myself to do an all out garage sell. I have to ride the coattails of others. We put some things out a year or two ago when we had a neighborhood wide sale. They are doing that again this month, so I am trying to get myself going to round up some of our junk to put out. I wish I could get the kids to sell/give away some of their stuffed toys. I think we may have more than you!
You should have done a preview for all of your FB blog friends. I would have totally grabbed the pillow pets. My kids think they are the greatest think since, Pokemon.
We too have to purge out stuffed animals every 6 months or so.
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