47 Project Purge: An ORGANIZED Garage Sale

Yes my friends, I am still alive.  I know I was MIA last Friday, but with good reason which I will share in an upcoming post, and it also has a little to do with this GARAGE SALE we hosted on Saturday!

Setting up a Garage Sale is no easy task, as many of you already know!  I honestly can't give you enough virtual hugs and sloppy smooches for all of your inspiring tips from my gearing up post last week!  You all got my booty in gear in so many ways when it came to setting up this little sale of ours, intended to assist in getting rid of all the items we purged back in April!

I thought it would be fun today to recap some of your tips and show how we incorporated them into our sale.  I will chat about what worked, what didn't and all the things we learned along the way!   Here we go!


1.  HELP!  I asked my BFF for help.  I have been busy busy at baseball every night, running the daycare every day and with all that needed to be done, my bff offered such a helping hand sorting and categorizing all of the items I had piled into the garage!

To say "Thanks", I played with her little guy and sent her home with some of his favorite trucks and goodies from the sale!

2.  Advertise!  We posted on Craigslist, however, not until the day of.  Mistake number one.  We totally should have ahead of time to gain more out of towners!  Lesson learned.  We did however, also place an ad in our local paper and included our information on a town list since it was the biggest garage sale weekend of the summer in our area.

3.  Signage!  We are big DIYers, so I made my own signs out of poster board, which we placed in front of our home!

We also had signs at the end of the street with arrows to ensure individuals from the busier streets would pop down our more quiet area!  We also strung large letters printed on card-stock from the front of the garage to bring just a little more attention to the place!

4.  Clean!  We purchased a big tub of disinfecting wipes and cleaned all of the items we placed out in the sale, we wiped down all toys and furniture and household items, to ensure there were no fingerprints or dust.  The better shape the items appears in, the more likely it is to sell!

5.  Categorize!  This is where I had the most fun of course, being the little sorter that I am!  You all suggested to use tables, and display things in categories as one would in a department store.  We did just that, we had tables for toys, we had tables for household items, we had clothes hung together!

In fact, we made it easier to sell "like" items together, by bundling things, either in paper bags:

Or Ziploc bags:

Or even with twine:

6.  Hang Clothing!  What's funny about this is we tried....

Twine wasn't strong enough.  Good thing the clothes fell the day before the sale and not during!  It was laughable.  We actually used two dog leashes hung from hooks screwed into the ceiling, to hold a metal rail instead.  That was much stronger and safer and worked oodles better!

7.  Make sure everything is clearly marked!  We marked items in a variety of ways, and not one shopper asked once about a price on anything {unless they were trying to talk us down}.  Nothing worse than hitting up a sale and having no clue what is for sale or for how much!

We used stickers...

I made signs for the clothes vs. marking them individually:

I placed similar items into bins or stacks and used note cards to price them all {vs. individually}:

 
8.  Price fairly!  A couple of you mentioned to price a little high to allow for the shoppers to bargain down the price a bit {since they will try!}, and others mentioned to price low because the whole point it to get rid of everything!  We did both.  We went a little higher on the bigger items since we knew those typically would be bargained for, and we stuck low with items such as toys and household goods.  It seemed to be a good balance.  And when things weren't selling, we moved them around or marked them down to try and push them out the door!  We even had some boxes out front marked "free" to not only make things easier for us, but to also encourage people to dig around a bit!
 

9.  Use your driveway!  We had tables lined up within the garage, and totally took advantage of reeling people in by placing all our larger and brighter items out in the driveway!

The kiddos even did some playing with the toys out front to demonstrate how much they are loved and to encourage youngster shoppers to beg their mom's to let them bring the items home... sneaky sneaky!

10.  Be prepared!  We used a plastic storage box we had on hand as our "money box".  But it was also a great place for us to stash extra batteries {for those wanting to ensure items truly were in working condition}, a calculator, new labels for marking items down, etc...

Also, since we don't typically bring home many bags from the grocery store since we have been "green bagging it" for over a year now, we popped by the local grocery store and asked for a stack of brown bags so that our shoppers would have a way to carry home their belongings.

11.  Play Music!  We popped a radio into the garage and left some quiet tunes playing to ensure it never got too quiet or awkward.  The hubs is a totally a chatter bug social butterfly, so he was pretty great about making his rounds with the shoppers as well!

12.  Be Careful!  Some great advice was to watch that money box closely and not to let strangers into your home.  We had individuals stop by from out of our town and even out of state scoping out the sale, you never can be too careful about what else they are scoping out.  Sad, but true!


13.  Mark it DOWN!  At the end of the day, mark items down to at least half off.  Or let individuals take a bag and fill it for a specific price.  Best advice we didn't take and now we are paying for it.  Lesson learned number two.  We had plans to do this, and all the sudden it was late in the day and we stopped getting visitors.  And then we thought about opening for an hour the following day and following the CLEARANCE plan, but we had things to do and it didn't happen.  Learn from my mistake, because now we have things left I KNOW could have been out of there, the whole point is to make a little moola from the purge before donating it for good.

14.  Have a bake sale/lemonade stand for the kids!  Yep, did that, and will post about that tomorrow since there are too many pictures already going on here!

15.  Goodbye!  You are now on your path to living more simply.  Take note of the items that you got rid of and make a mental note as to why.  Enjoy your new simplified space and remember the "Less is More" saying before making impulse purchases.  DO NOT BRING YOUR LEFTOVER ITEMS BACK INSIDE!  Donate donate donate!

So to recap our sale.  We did really well considering we only ran it one day and it was on the last day of a three day garage sale party that the town was having {so we are sure most people were probably already garage saled out}.  We weren't $1000 super stars like many of you, however, we raked in about $400 which was our goal {we have a fun basement project in the works and now it's funded completely!}.  And the $400 isn't bad considering we really didn't have many large items and we priced everything pretty low, we really cleared out most of the products which was GREAT and the whole point!  What really surprised us is that we opened at 7:00 a.m. and didn't get our first customer until almost 9:00!!  Where were all those early birds?  The weather wasn't working in our favor either, it was only about 50-60 degrees and cloudy all morning and many of the shoppers were complaining of being cold.  Only in Wisconsin...lol. Clothes didn't sell AT ALL {we only had mine for sale, kid's clothes are always handed down to friends and family}.  Only one pair of paints and that was it!  Adult sizes are a challenge to sell since you must have a buyer your exact size, I knew that might happen, and I feel great that I have a lot to donate instead.  The best part is the feeling of shedding the waste.  It's crazy to think how much space excess items can take up in your home!  And visual clutter is totally mental clutter!

Thanks again to everyone for your encouraging tips and tricks!  You really helped me out!

Anyone else rake in some dough through a garage/yard/rumage sale this weekend?  Who else is itching to sell the purge?  Did we miss any other important tips?