Garage sale wrap-up

Last Friday and Saturday was the garage sale, piggy-backing on the advertising our neighbors did to get folks to drive down our street.  Here's why I think it was a rousing success:

Before: head-on view of the (2-car) garage

We spent 2 days sitting outside in the shade, ate out both nights, and made $450 selling our stuff.

After: still a 2-car garage, but better!

There was a steady stream of people coming by, and we sold all the larger furniture items.  In fact, we even sold most (easily more than half) of all the other stuff, too.  Our guiding philosophy for pricing was, "What can I charge and still ensure that this item goes away?"

The post-garage-sale what-to-do-with-the-leftovers question was not as easy as last year.  Ended up with 5 locations for items:

• pile for passing along to my children (very few items, carefully screened)
• Goodwill (which we dropped off as soon as the sale was over)
• Community Sharing (local organization that hosts the food bank and supplies families experiencing hardship with household goods)
• Bring Recycling (reuse warehouse for building materials)
• Quilter's Yard Sale pile

Notice that there's not a category for it-didn't-sell-and-I-couldn't-part-with-it-so-I'm-keeping-it items.  No sir.

Here's what did not happen - a view of my neighbor's yard, with bins of unsold garage sale items piled up and ready to go back into the storage shed.

So glad we took some time Sunday to sweep up and organize things in the newly-vacated garage.  It looks amazing!!  Not perfect, but organized so even I (who used to be afraid of the garage) can find stuff.

We already started talking about having another garage sale.  Maybe not as soon as next year (a divorce and two moves have a way of flushing out the excess items), but I can imagine another wave of decluttering resulting in enough stuff for another sell-it-all extravaganza within a couple years.