Yard Sale Hell

What do you think about Yard Sales? I think going to one is a whole lot more fun than trying to make one actually work.

A few years back when we were still living in New Mexico Cindy and her good Friend Debbie decided to do a Garage Sale/Moving Sale to help Debbie get rid of some unwanted stuff she didn’t want to move to the new home she and hubby Russ had just bought and to also get rid of some stuff from our house that was cluttering up my Garage/ Work Shop, my Garage happened to get extremely cluttered when this garage sale idea was hatched between the girls, and to get rid of this clutter I either had to haul it over to Debbie’s or put it back into our house which would not be a good idea so after I got off work I loaded my truck and hauled boxes of stuff to the scene of the crime garage sale for the girls to unload, price, and dump sell beginning Friday morning and going through the weekend.

I stopped by the next day on my lunch break to see how they were doing and was surprised to see how busy they actually were, I spent my lunch hour helping them load things into peoples cars and was sad to find out that since I was so much help and was off work the next day that my help would be appreciated at daybreak, I showed up and immediately began helping to set up the merchandise, the day went quickly and most of the stuff sold, some of it was to one another but the girls split the profits and what didn’t sell was boxed up and hauled to our house to be stored for the next one they had already planned.

The day of the next one about a year later came too quickly and was planned to be held at our house this time, this meant I had to hide or either cover up everything that was mine and I didn’t want sold, Debbie showed up early and like a Drill Sergeant she began getting us lined out, Cindy was just as tough as she because they remembered how well the last one went, the only difference was this time they has Jimmy in the mix from the start, I got out my trusty staple gun and tacked sheets over all my tools and Nascar stuff in the garage which didn’t go over real good, not for covering up my stuff but for stapling sheets to the walls, I also got myself into trouble by marking out their prices and changing the numbers, the stuff they had marked .25 cents was worth about five dollars so I changed the prices marked on the box to three dollars and crossed it out and marked one dollar fifty cents below it for example, now they were getting a buck fifty for their quarter merchandise, I got myself yelled at until a man came up and bought the whole box, now I was in charge of pricing.

The sale ended with a couple boxes of odds and ends, you know stuff like doll heads, broken Micky Dees toys, missing pieces and other things that either didn’t work or had missing pieces, basically we had two boxes of stuff I was going to take to the trash when up staggered two women they were either drunk or high on something and began digging through these boxes, one pulled something out of the box and asked for a price, Cindy looked at me and I popped off actually looking for a laugh or for an offer that they would carry off these two boxes “Ten Dollars for everything” The lady looked shocked and I was waiting for something I didn’t want to hear when she reached into her pocket and handed Cindy a ten and picked up a box, the other lady says “Hey wait a minute” and pulled out a ten also and said “I want the other box” last I saw these two boxes of trash they were staggering down the street with their new owners who were so happy at the deal they had just got.

The last Garage Sale we had was at Debbie’s house, I was officially retired at this time and being on the crutches there was not a lot of loading or carrying I could do so my job was to price stuff and talk to the customers, I do love to talk with people and sold a lot of stuff in box lots to keep from selling a few things and keeping a bunch, I was less likely to recognize stuff of mine that needed to go back home or to buy stuff from Debbie because the reason we were having this sale was to get rid of things, Debbie got a little carried away when she hauled out her husbands favorite couch and chair to get rid of, Russ argued the point and set the price high in hopes that it wouldn’t sell because he really didn’t want to see it go, at the end of this one we were so sick of sales and said that nothing would be stored at our house for the next sale, Cindy found a group that picks up things from yard sales to sell at their place to help with a Drug Rehab program we all agreed and in less than an hour everything was loaded into the back of a truck by these fine young men and was on it’s way to their facility including Russ’s Couch which he was not pleased to find out about, he actually went down on Monday morning to pick his couch back up and was told that it was the first thing that sold that morning, and he had just missed it.

When we moved to California we had a whole lot of things we needed to get rid of, we talked about how much we could make by having a moving sale, we discussed how we would have to set up the merchandise for sale and not mix it up with the things we were packing to move, this discussion was made over and over as we laughed loudly and drove it all to the local Goodwill office and proudly donated it all, because it is much more rewarding to donate than to sell especially after you have had a few yard sales.