I got home from Houston around 6:00 Thursday night, and after a quick 15-minute reprieve on the new couches (they arrived Thursday!), set into action to get ready for our Good Friday/Easter weekend garage sale. About the best you could say we’d done to get ready in advance was cleaning off/out the old couches last weekend and moving them to the garage … everything else was left to be done Thursday night. Since every yard sale I’ve ever had has kept me up all night the night before, I figured it was pointless — given that I knew I’d be up most or all of Thursday night — to extend the stressful preparations beyond the day before. Why do this week what you’ll probably have to redo the night before, anyway? 🙂
At any rate, Daniel and I moved stuff to the garage, I started hanging clothes (they had been sitting in plastic garbage bags since we moved, left over from our garage sale last October), and he was working on organizing the garage. His dad came over with some additional yard-sale items (coffee tables and the like), and then we decided — after 90 minutes of work — that we desperately needed a break and went to Ojeda’s for some Mexican food. (Ole!)
Once we got back, Daniel had to help his friend Rhett bring over a couple of carloads of stuff; meanwhile, I went to Lowe’s and Wal-Mart to buy sign-making supplies. We all rendezvous’d back at the house around 10 or 10:30 p.m. … and that’s when the real work began.
We were up until about 4 a.m. that night, doing everything from organizing to making signs, and I was back up at 5:45 to start moving stuff out into the driveway and getting everything in place and ready.
People began arriving right at 7 a.m., and by noon we had moved most of our big items (and there were a LOT of big items: a bed & mattress set, two couches, three sets of coffee/end tables, two desks, a dresser, a gun safe, a large doggie house/carrier thingy that I got with Rags, etc., etc…). By 1:30 or so we had stopped selling much beyond clothes, and when we shut down at 3:00 or so, we’d all made an aggregate of about $750 and managed to sell practically everything… so much so that we determined opening up again on Saturday was essentially pointless.
We were left with a dresser that Daniel’s decided to use to store stuff in out in the garage (it has a total of nine very shallow drawers in columns of three), three garbage bags of clothes and one box of miscellaneous stuff to go to Goodwill, a desk chair of his dad’s, two 17″ monitors (one of which — DUH Liz — I’m going to take to work to use instead of the wimpy 14″ monitor I’ve been using for the last two years), and a 25-year-old microwave that seems destined for Goodwill as well. All of that from a garage sale so massive it spilled into our driveway and backyard, in addition to filling up the garage itself, when we began Friday morning. Not bad for a day’s work, eh?
This was a far more interesting garage sale than our sale last October. It was a far prettier day — sunny and low 70s by afternoon … perfect, really — and we had a lot more traffic in general. Which, of course, meant we had far more crazies stop by.
One older woman came by around noon-ish and slid her car diagonally into our driveway, half blocking the alley and totally blocking our driveway. She made a quick 60-second pass through the sale and then got back in her car, rolled down the windows, and started screaming, “IT’S AGAINST THE LAW TO BLOCK A DRIVEWAY! YOU PEOPLE ARE BLOCKING ME IN! I’M GOING TO CALL THE POLICE!” In general, she was making an extreme fuss over something that happens at every Dallas yard sale I’ve ever seen; namely, that people pull into the alley, cruise through the sale, and then leave. It’s accepted; *everyone* does it. Apparently, she was on a mission from God to save us all from the $15 fine that blocking an alley apparently incurs. She drove up and down our alley twice screaming bloody murder, and after she’d said “POLICE” several times loudly, our entire sale clientele — comprised largely of Hispanic families — cleared the place. So not only was she being a bitch and bought nothing, but she chased away all of our customers.
Rhett had a nifty hydraulic-looking water gun marked for $5 that every kid played with but nobody wanted to buy, and soon after the angry lady had left and people meekly began returning to the sale, one kid picked it up and carried it around the sale for at least 10 or 15 minutes. He even asked Rhett how much it cost, and grimaced a bit when Rhett said five bucks. We got really busy for a while, and once it slowed down a bit again we couldn’t find the water gun anywhere. We were convinced the kid had walked off with it, and a woman who’d been there for a while was asking where the water gun was because she, apparently, wanted to buy it — for the full price of $5, even. (I’ve learned nobody at these things really wants to pay sticker price — EVER. It’s crazy. Thankfully, though, we’re bargainers. 😉
Anyway, we all ranted and raved for a while about the kid who walked off with the water gun … and 30 minutes later or so, some kid pulled it out from under the mattress (it was set up on a frame) and said, “Why is this water gun under the bed?”
Whoops. False alarm. I think it sold for $4. 🙂
It was quite a day, and after we shut up shop and divided up the money, Daniel and I went to take a bath and a “short” nap … which ended up being about five hours long. We got up long enough to fetch some Sonic and watch an episode of Star Trek – Next Generation (my education has begun, apparently) before we crashed out in bed again for another solid eight hours.
Note to self: Good Fridays make *excellent* garage sale days!
As a bonus, I read on Kathy‘s blog that TWU did, in fact, get sent home at noon Friday. Yippee!
Also, Mark stopped by on Friday to say hello, which was very nice of him. 🙂