Let me be clear...I grew up in a family where garage sales were serious business. You start early and you never accept the listed price and the signs had better be good. I loved going with my dad and watching him negotiate with the sellers. He was the best at playing it cool and walking away if the price was too high!
Unfortunately, I'm terrible at bartering. When we were in Dubai, we were told over and over to barter in the marketplaces, but I never did. I'm just not good at it and I cave way too easily. And I've never wanted to host my own sale, because it seemed like way too much work! Plus, it always made a little nauseous to think about putting all of my belongings out on the front yard and pricing them for total strangers: what is no one likes my stuff? What if I list everything way too high? Or way too low? In the past, if I was cleaning out a room, I either gave the things to a friend, donated them to Goodwill, or threw them out.
I finally reached the point where we had so much stuff we wanted to get rid of that we had to have a sale! Our new house won't fit all of our current furniture, Mel moved out 2 weeks ago and left a bunch of stuff that wouldn't fit in her new apartment, and we wanted some extra money to purchase some new pieces that would fit the new house better.
I spent all last week painting signs and thinking about pricing. Our sale was on Saturday, so my amazing husband went out in the insanely cold weather Friday night and hammered in all of our signs for the big day! It went great! I couldn't believe anyone came out since it was about 20 degrees in the morning, but we had a pretty steady stream. We ended up selling enough to buy Bella and Evelyn's new beds and a little extra to go towards a new couch! (I think our current couch would look too massive in the new house, so Whitney's buying it! Score!)
My dad would have been so proud! We bartered like champs! (It was much easier being on the "seller" end of that system.) I still felt a little pressure to give in quickly, but I tried my best to counter with a better price if I felt they were going way too low.
We froze our tails off, but we made some "fun money" for the new house and met some really nice people in the process! Bonus for also using it as a passive-aggressive way of telling our neighbors that we're moving!
This was only about a third of our signs...it took a freakishly long time to paint all of them! I'll admit, I was in full on martyr-mode by Friday night.
Bella kept me company during the last few and painted her own sign!
Most of our stuff lined up to sell. (I could only get half the driveway with my phone.) So thankful people came out to buy our "junk"!
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