Anatomy of a Yard Sale
7 a.m. People are soooooo going to buy my sh*t!
8 a.m. Come on people, it’s time to buy my sh*t!
9 a.m. People are actually buying my sh*t!
11 a.m. Is anyone going to buy any more of my sh*t?
Noon. I’ll pay you to take my sh*t!
My mom and I survived our yard sale Saturday. The weather was absolutely gorgeous and at the end of the day I had a nice farmer’s tan from my shoulders down. Now if I could only get my legs to tan and not blend into my khaki shorts.
The past week or so I’ve been running on caffeine and end of the school year adrenaline and find myself doing everything via the seat of my pants, especially with a thousand loose ends to tie up before summer vacation. My mom, on the other hand, is very organized and meticulous, so thankfully our conflicting styles didn’t clash and the sale went off without a hitch, although I temporarily lost my money bag (i.e. zippered pencil pouch) with all my hard-earned cash. I made a whopping $50 and change, but that was my conservative goal, so I was fine with that. A family expecting another baby and with two young children in tow bought our jog stroller and car seat and I felt good about them finding a good home. I didn’t have any high dollar items, such as furniture, but wanted to clear out our overstuffed closets and junk drawers. When every drawer in your home is living up to its potential to be a junk drawer, you know it’s time to purge. Miss C had filled a large garbage bag with stuffed animals deemed “not pretty” over the holidays and she’d never missed them, so on to the yard sale they went.
In one of those karma yard sale moments, someone found a coin from our long gone vintage 1970s Fisher Price cash register in a box of hodge-podge toys that Miss C and I had thrown together last week for the sale. It was a blue coin, and the woman told me she had just bought the very same classic toy cash register and that was the one coin that was missing.
I advertised our sale on Craigslist and within hours got an e-mail from someone with a local charity who was willing to pick up what was left over, so clean up was pretty minimal. Still, I’m not sure I’ll have another yard sale for several more years or maybe ever. I’m thinking I may be better suited for yard sale shopping. Miss C and I hit two yard sales weekend before last and I bought a Hello Kitty t-shirt, a new Hello Kitty notebook with stickers, a My Little Pony Ponyville play set, a book, and a Barbie for a whopping $6.75!
Beats the $12 I did a couple of years ago though. I don’t know about Tennessee but people here in Utah are ridiculous in their trying to talk me down. A quarter? What’s up with that? One lady tried to walk away with a .75 skirt.
