It has been about a month since I discovered The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, and I have been decluttering and discarding items from my house in a frenzy. Our neighborhood garage sale had impeccable timing for us to get rid of our stuff.
I’ve only done two garage sales in my life, and I’m quite certain this will be my last. Today’s garage sale left me weary, defeated, past the point of exhaustion and slightly irritated with mankind.
Lessons Learned
Just in case I change my mind, I wanted to write down the 5 things I learned about garage sales today:
1. One man’s treasure is another man’s trash
While cleaning out my house, I threw out anything that was broken, missing pieces or not usable so what we put out for the garage sale was pretty good stuff. Garage sale buyers do not care one whit about how much you paid for something, how well it still works or why it was special to you. All they are looking for is a deal.
2. People don’t want to play fair
We saw an episode of Kate Plus 8 where they had a garage sale and let people pay whatever they thought the items were worth. I thought this was completely brilliant because my first garage sale experience included endless hours of putting annoying little colored stickers on things to price them before the sale.
I did not want to deal with the hassle of pricing so I made a sign that said, “Take what you need, pay what is fair.” Besides being a difficult concept to translate to Spanish and making buyers uncomfortable, people don’t equate garage sales with fair prices, which resulted in annoying back and forth haggling anyway.
3. Fuzzy stuff sells
Despite my disdain for stuffed animals, we have amassed quite a collection over the years thanks to well-meaning friends and family who give our children sweet gifts. As I piled a huge plastic tub full of them in the wee hours of the morning, I told my husband that nobody would buy used stuffed animals. I now take that back and if I ever do a garage sale again it will be exclusively a stuffed animal sale with an emphasis on ones that sing, dance or roll around on the floor.
4. Free is too high of a price to pay
As our garage sale came to a close, we started offering some items for free, which actually backfired. At the prospect of a free item, people tended to think for a moment and come to the realization that they actually didn’t need any more crap in their life either. Apparently in garage sales, 50 cents is king.
5. Everything must go
My first garage sale was six years and two moves ago and to this day I still find things marked with little neon $1 stickers around my house. I could slap myself for this! We vowed that not one garage sale item would make its way back into our house. When the rush of buyers slowed down around noon, we packed everything up and took it to a donation center for a local charity for a win-win for everyone.
Despite my tired feet and drained soul, I’d call our garage sale a success: my bank account has a few more dollars, my house feels lighter and strangers are finding new joy in my old things.
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