In an earlier post I talked about moving my mom from independent living to assisted living. I also mentioned that she was one step short of a hoarder.
Two dumpsters and about thirty-five 55-gallon garbage bags later, what didn’t go with my mom to her new teeny-tiny assisted living apartment, came to my clean, clutter-free house.
I made a pact with myself that whatever boxes I brought back to my house, each item was going to be cleaned before I went back for more. I did this for about 14 days in a row. That meant her collection of throw pillows, sweaters, jackets, afghans, etc., were washed. Each knick-knack, and believe me there were hundreds, kitchen items, cookware and God only knows what else, were all washed in warm soap and water.
As everything was cleaned it went into my basement for sorting and pricing. That took another couple of weeks. I set the garage sales dates for April 26th & 27th, 8am to 3pm. My sister from Michigan was coming to help.
I made arrangements to borrow 5 tables. Each was covered with a nice tablecloth. I think I was hoping that the better everything looked, the more people would buy. Since it’s been about 20 years since I’ve had a garage sale, I didn’t know if anything had changed.
Social media seems to be the way to advertise so I picked three or four different sites and advertised as well as on Nextdoor and Facebook. I created a cute little ad and repeated it on each site about every other day.
Garage Sale signs were ordered from Amazon and strategically placed within blocks of my home. Everything was set up the day before so that we could have a relaxing morning the first day of the sale. Not knowing what to expect, I wasn’t sure if I should have arranged for crowd control. Someone told me that sometimes people show up the night before to get the best stuff or they show up one or two hours before the advertised start time for the same reason.
By 8:30am all I heard was crickets. My sister said where she lives, the crowds start shining around about 9am. Sure as all hell, 9am rolled around and people started arriving.
Very few people bickered on price over the course of two days. Several made comments on how clean and organized everything was. That made me feel that all that work was worth it. I don’t care for small talk but thank God my sister does. Several people just wanted to chit-chat and she obliged all of them. Our husbands graciously helped people who purchased multiple items get everything safely to their cars.
About fifty percent of my mother’s treasures sold and the rest we boxed up as soon as the sale was over and took them to St Vincent de Paul. Two full SUV’s of ‘stuff’. After we got home, we had a nice dinner, were in bed by 8pm, and my sister left the next morning. After stripping beds and doing laundry I spent the afternoon sleeping on the couch.
As God is my witness I will never, ever do this again. The reward isn’t worth the work.
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