Garage Sales Always Surprise Me.
Jun. 19th, 2011 07:15 pmRae and I had our garage sale yesterday. ![[profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
ald_fan_girl was kind enough to help me put up signs around my neighborhood on Friday (and all of them stayed up! Yay duct tape!), and on Saturday morning, we woke up, opened the garage door, and set things up in the driveway and on the lawn. We had a lot of clothes, a couple of chairs, a day bed, a ton of books and dishes, and a bunch of random stuff.
We sold some of the bigger things early in the day. We got rid of the free-standing one-room air conditioner that required the installation of a window vent, my old tv-vcr combo, and the two DVD players, one of which had a British plug, very early on. In the middle of the day, we sold a lot of clothes and a surprising number of shoes. Then, at the very end, a family ended up with the day bed, and a college age guy from around the corner ended up with one of the black chairs (the one where the swivel still worked) and our set of beige dishes with the green stripe. I'm glad that the set of dishes we've used for so long went to someone that needed it. After we packed everything in, we took an entire carload of stuff we didn't sell to Goodwill, and today we took five or six boxes of books to the Friends of the Library drop off. Both of those are good causes, and it feels amazing not to have all of that stuff in my life any more. We don't have to move it, we don't have to store it, and we don't have to think about it ever again.
We also found out that the electric company will come and pick up our old fridge and give us fifty bucks for it. I'm really glad that we didn't give it to the guy who offered to haul it away but wasn't willing to pay us for it.
What surprised me about the whole thing was what sold and what didn't. For instance: none of the board games sold, even the one that was still in the packaging, with the exception of a Simpsons chess set with one missing piece. We also didn't sell a single Star Wars book or manga. This was, I think, mostly an advertising problem. Our signs should have read as follows:
GARAGE SALE
TWO GEEKS DOWNSIZING.
STAR WARS STUFF AND COMIC CON EXCLUSIVES.
That probably would have gotten us the kind of customers who would have been interested in our stuff. (Though Rae did manage to sell her Captain America Comic-Con t-shirt to an interested geek... my girlfriend is quite the salesperson.)
We decided not to have the sale today since most of the stuff people seemed to be interested in was gone by the end of yesterday, and we wanted today to run errands and move some of the boxes that are going straight into our half of the new garage (Christmas decorations, Halloween stuff, camping stuff...) over to the new place.
U-haul truck is scheduled for a week from today. We are really moving. This is really happening.
I think I'm almost kind of ready.
ald_fan_girl was kind enough to help me put up signs around my neighborhood on Friday (and all of them stayed up! Yay duct tape!), and on Saturday morning, we woke up, opened the garage door, and set things up in the driveway and on the lawn. We had a lot of clothes, a couple of chairs, a day bed, a ton of books and dishes, and a bunch of random stuff. We sold some of the bigger things early in the day. We got rid of the free-standing one-room air conditioner that required the installation of a window vent, my old tv-vcr combo, and the two DVD players, one of which had a British plug, very early on. In the middle of the day, we sold a lot of clothes and a surprising number of shoes. Then, at the very end, a family ended up with the day bed, and a college age guy from around the corner ended up with one of the black chairs (the one where the swivel still worked) and our set of beige dishes with the green stripe. I'm glad that the set of dishes we've used for so long went to someone that needed it. After we packed everything in, we took an entire carload of stuff we didn't sell to Goodwill, and today we took five or six boxes of books to the Friends of the Library drop off. Both of those are good causes, and it feels amazing not to have all of that stuff in my life any more. We don't have to move it, we don't have to store it, and we don't have to think about it ever again.
We also found out that the electric company will come and pick up our old fridge and give us fifty bucks for it. I'm really glad that we didn't give it to the guy who offered to haul it away but wasn't willing to pay us for it.
What surprised me about the whole thing was what sold and what didn't. For instance: none of the board games sold, even the one that was still in the packaging, with the exception of a Simpsons chess set with one missing piece. We also didn't sell a single Star Wars book or manga. This was, I think, mostly an advertising problem. Our signs should have read as follows:
GARAGE SALE
TWO GEEKS DOWNSIZING.
STAR WARS STUFF AND COMIC CON EXCLUSIVES.
That probably would have gotten us the kind of customers who would have been interested in our stuff. (Though Rae did manage to sell her Captain America Comic-Con t-shirt to an interested geek... my girlfriend is quite the salesperson.)
We decided not to have the sale today since most of the stuff people seemed to be interested in was gone by the end of yesterday, and we wanted today to run errands and move some of the boxes that are going straight into our half of the new garage (Christmas decorations, Halloween stuff, camping stuff...) over to the new place.
U-haul truck is scheduled for a week from today. We are really moving. This is really happening.
I think I'm almost kind of ready.