These are the awesome signs that I painted & Devon hung up around our neighborhood to draw people in. We also posted free ads at Craigslist.org and our local newspaper, The Seattle Times/NW Source. Notice that the signs say: 8am – 4pm? Yeah. The first person arrived at 7.10am way before the signs even went up. We had a good day. It was really long and exhausting, but we got rid of a TON of stuff, we made a TON of money and we met some more of our neighbors. We also met a bunch of wack jobs.
The highlights (and low lights):
- We had a broken Razr cell phone (they usually cost about $100). The keypad doesn’t work, so we were going to sell it for $0.25 as a kid’s toy or whatever. However, before we got a chance to mark it, some douche bag pocketed it and took off. We know it was one of 2 guys. In a way, I’m glad they decided to steal that, because it isn’t worth anything, but it pisses me off that they only took it because they thought that it would be worth a lot of money. In the end I take a large amount of satisfaction in knowing that they will spend a couple of frustrating hours trying to figure out why they can’t get the phone to work.
- The 20 odd groups of people who showed up before our listed starting time. (mostly collectors and resellers of books & costume jewelry.)
- The guy in his 60′s who bought my sexy Medusa Halloween costume. hehe. (You can see the costume here.)
- We had about 30 DVDs for sale. Out of the first 5 to get snagged up, 3 of them were soft-core vampire-y type movies and they were purchased a middle aged woman who was there with her young kids. Titles included: Female Vampire and Scarlet Diva. (Don’t look at me! Selling such risque material at our yard sale is totally blamed on Devon.)
- About 5 groups of people wanted to buy our massive styrofoam columns! We sold them around noon for $5, but really we would have just been happy for someone to take them for free! (you can also see part of the column archway in the “medusa picture” here.)
- Fifi hung out with us for a while on one of the chairs that we were trying to sell… Reactions from prospective buyers ranged from a high pitched squeal of “EWWWW!!!” to a woman who was an animal rescuer who completely and totally fell in love with the Fif-ster and ended up carrying Fifi around on her shoulders for about a half hour.
- The multiple almost-collisions that happened in front of our house as cars slammed on the breaks as they drove past our house and saw that we were having a yard sale.
- Devon was selling his massive collection of music CDs at 5 for $1. His collection consisted of a bunch of techo/electronica/angry-German-industrial. A woman, possibly in her 60s, ended up buying about $9 worth of his music. Devon wasn’t sure how to feel about that.. Either he listens to old people music, or the woman had super cool taste in music. I think that it was a little bit of column A & a little bit of column B.
- It was really interesting to see what people spent their money on. We had a bunch of really great deals on some really quality items, but a bunch of that stuff ended up unsold at the end of the day. However almost all of the ugly cheap stuff ended up being purchased. Like freebie mesh bags, freebie metal tins and other really hideous stuff that I wanted to trash originally, but figured I’d put out in our yard sale to make it look like we had more stuff to sell.
- The lady who pulled up and asked if she could donate stuff to our yard sale. I was kinda confused, so I said sure. She ended up needing Devon’s help to unload a truckload (seriously, she was in a truck) of old, dirty, damaged garden hoses. As soon as I saw them, I though “crap! Are those all going to fit in my trash can at the end of today?”. Then, to top it off, she ended up buying some computer stuff from Devon and tried to hit him up for a major discount because she “donated” to our yardsale… ::rolls eyes::. Yeah, no. But thanks for playing. Oh and btw, no one bought any of her nasty hoses.
I’m sure there are some other amusing stories that I’m forgetting. It was a very busy day. But it was great. Our guest room was originally filled with stuff to sell, and at the end of the day all that we were left with was 2 boxes of stuff to donate to Goodwill (tax deductions!!!), 2 boxes of books to donate to our local library (tax deductions!!!) and 1-2 boxes of stuff to ebay/post on Craigslist (more monies!!!). Oh! and a large stack of green bills.
In the end we did really well. Lemur is very excited about our proceeds.
[...] The Yard Sale! [...]