This is what our driveway looked like at 6:00pm Friday night. It was getting cold and dark, but we were still busy setting up for our garage sale. We spent most of the afternoon yesterday cleaning out our shed and bringing things upstairs from the black hole that we lovingly call “the supply closet”. I knew that we had a lot of stuff but I truly had no idea how much space all of this stuff would take up. Our driveway was full of toys, vases, clothing, furniture, cables/cords, etc. I was a bit ashamed that we had so many things that we didn’t use nor want. As our neighbor told his wife, “They have a lot of crap out there.” Of course that same neighbor came and bought our fake trees and a ladder. :).
The smartest thing we did was to set it all up the night before – trusting that no one would mess with it over night, and they didn’t. I also decided not to price tag anything. It would have taken too long and people want to haggle with you anyway. I just let everyone ask me what the price was and then I made one up on the spot. I said in my ad on Craigslist (which is the only place I advertised) that the sale started at 8:00am. I knew that a few people would show up at the crack of dawn anyway, and they did. There was a car on my lawn by 6:40 waiting there so that he could be the first to buy the stereo equipment. Some customers were eager, but the people most excited for the sale were the kids. Faith helped me make the signs the night before and then set her alarm for 6:30am so that she could get up and help me put the signs out on the road. She was giddy with excitement. She helped carry my purse with change in it and help me keep an eye out for customers. She stuck by my side even though it was a mere 32 degrees when the sale started. Brrrrrrrr……
Some people don’t like garage sales because they have issues with strangers going through their belongings. Not me! I looked at most of that stuff and had zero personal attachment to it. Most of it had been given to us and some of it was stuff that Tom brought into the marriage that had never even been used. Tom’s big saying for the weekend was “get rid of it!”. Our motivation for having the yard sale is that we didn’t want to have to move it all to the next house after we sold this one. We are preparing to put the house on the market and move in the next few months. The last thing we need is cart all of the stuff that we haven’t used in years to another house so that it can all just sit there and take up space again.
Honestly, it felt great to get rid of all of that “crap”. It truly was all just stuff that we didn’t need. We should have been embarrassed to have all of those things that we deemed virtually worthless. There are people around the world with nothing and we had an entire driveway of stuff that we didn’t want and that we were selling for almost nothing. There were a few items that I wanted to make some money on and I tried not to think about how much we spent on it compared to how much we made at the sale. Even after the garage sale was over, we were still able to fill up Tom’s Volvo with all of the stuff that we didn’t sell. Tom said that the guy at the Goodwill rolled his eyes and said an expletive when he saw Tom rolling up with an SUV full of stuff to donate. 
Today Tom commented about how much lighter he felt knowing that all of that extra stuff was gone from the house. It really was a stress reliever to empty out the shed and the supply closet. Overall, the yard sale was a success. It required a minimal amount of work, and we made a good bit of money taboot!