Stupid me accidentally deleted the pictures of the garage sale off my camera…so you’ll just have to imagine some pictures.

Saturday I held my first ever garage sale! Here’s a few pointers I tried to keep in mind when planning it:

• Location & time are important! This was an easy one for me, since our trailer park holds a park-wide garage sale every year. LOTS of people come out for it! If it hadn’t been for this event I probably just would have given most of our things to Goodwill and sold a few through craigslist.
• Advertise. This was also easy since, the trailer park did some advertising. But we also posted on facebook and craigslist, letting people know about it and even mentioning some of the things we’d be selling. Both were free ways to advertise.
• Set up your things well. We tried putting bigger items close to the road so people could see them, like our grill and table saw. I layed the clothes out on a table keeping them organized by size and clothing type, although I think it would have been better if they were hanging up. Make sure everything is visible.
• Have prices on everything. Almost everything was individually marked, except some tools we just layed on a table with a sign that said $1 and clothes I had a sign that said 50 cents.
• Have an extension cord for people to try out electrical items. Since we were selling so many power tools this came in handy many times!
• Be ready early. The park wide sale was supposed to start at 8, but people were already coming a little before that.
• At the end of the day sell stuff cheaply. Towards the end, we knew anything we didn’t sell would just go to Goodwill, so we were much more willing to bring prices down just to get ride of them.

And here’s some tips I learned the hard way:

• Get change!! Cameron had to go out and get me some one dollar bills.
• If you’re selling tools, make sure you know something about them (or at least what they’re called). I felt like an idiot when people asked me how to use certain power tools, and I wasn’t even sure what it did.
• Don’t drink too much water and tea if you’re the only one out there and don’t want to leave your spot.

In conclusion I feel like it was very much worth our effort, we got rid of a lot of things we didn’t use anymore and made over $400!! It didn’t take us much time to collect, clean and price the things to sell. The biggest chunk of time was the actual day of selling. Gracia even pitched in, by waving people down. I gave her a couple of dollars, since she sold a toy and some books, which she very happily used to by some mystery flavor gum.

What garage sale tips do you have?