Garage Sale Madness

After our flea market escapades late last year, Michelle and I decided to have our very own garage sale at the Henderson Ranch. It was a flurry of excitement as we prepared our newspaper ads, priced our crap err items, and got our fancy signs posted. I recruited my mum to help out so the night before the big day we got my pile of stuff to sell together. A few of the items didn't make it to the sale as this is the pile of things my mum decided to "purchase":

So the next morning as our alarms went off at 4.30am - argggghhh - we packed up the car and drove off to Pine Mountain. We arrived at 6.00am - argggghhhh again and found Michelle and Greg well under way with displaying their precious homewares.

So I started getting my stuff out and here's when I learnt my first rule of garage sales. No matter what time you say the garage sale starts, people will turn up an hour before.

Why I don't know. Our sale was clearly advertised as 7-12. It was also cleared advertised with the statement "NO EARLY BIRDS". So of course some lady charged in at 10 past 6 with a lame excuse of having to go to work and started on going through every single item and creating a little pile for herself. After 45mins of picking and us still putting stuff out she asked "is that everything out now?" I had to refrain from pointing out that we still had 15 mins before we actually were supposed to start. Here I learnt the second rule of garage sales. People are never happy with your stuff.

Anyway during her reign over the tables, we had a few more early birds turn up (NO EARLY BIRDS PEOPLE!!), then there was dead silence for the next 30 mins and we all realised it was only 7.30am and we still had four and a half hours to go. Oi Vey. Third rule of garage sales - Make sure you are doing it with people you like and are entertaining. Otherwise you will possibly die of boredom. And bring snacks.

Michelle let her dogs out to sniff about and scare people away for a while (well that's what we decided happened). Michelle wouldn't let me put price tags on the dogs. Party Pooper.

Then I learnt the fourth rule of garage sales - people travel around garage sales in packs. It was bizarre. We'd have 2 groups of people show up, then 30 mins would go past, then three groups, then another 45 mins, then 2 groups. I did ask them if they were following each other and they denied it. Hmmmmmm.

Several loooooooooong hours later we all started counting down till 12 and started to get ready to take home our unsold stuff. Michelle demonstrated how she felt about this:

So we packed up and counted our money....Michelle demonstrated how she felt about this:

All in all it was a good experience and I made a bit of extra money which was fab. Next week Michelle and I return to the flea market for a last ditch effort to get rid of the rest of it. Good luck to us - I look forward to getting up at the crack of dawn again. Not.