Yard Sale Yelp

I remember my first experience with a garage sale. I was about 7 or 8 years old and thought myself a complete genius for thinking of a lemonade stand. I had a little TV tray table set up with my Kool-Aid type lemonade and neon green sign that I decorated for it. I think I made a total of about $10, but to a 7 year old...it might as well been $1000...

I did the same when I was about 10...my grandma was moving from Redwood City to Morgan Hill and thus had to "unload" some 50 years of "stuff". I again had my lemonade stand, this time not so successful. I did, however, managed to sell some of my old toys and stuff I had grown out of. I think that time I made about $25. I was moving up!

Well...fast forward about a dozen or more years, and here I am. I'm going through our storage unit in our house and all our closets to weed out items we don't need or use anymore (and all items are chosen by the both of us, not one picking on the other)..we've got it all: furniture, electronics, baby items (from Summer and Skyler), HUNDREDS of DVDs, housewares, gifts, etc...and boy did wierdos come out of the woodwork.

Day 1: Saturday the 16th...
Jake and I are up at 5am to go put yard sale signs around the neighborhood. We've already put a couple of ads on craigslist. We start putting things out on our front grass "patch" at about 6am...our first (and only) early bird comes at 8:40. The yard sale officially opens at 9am. We've got it all...from older men asking for p-o-r-n, to old ladies wanting 10 things for $1, to little kids rifling through the knick-knacky toy bin...but we didn't mind. I never got sad to see the items go, and I never regretted a sale...well maybe one...but it's alright. Jake's mom pays us a visit and helps herself to a 10 cent plastic collander, and our neighbor down the street is all-to-enthusiastic about my mom's eBay trinket box "order from hell"...even our housemate is buying stuff from candles and picture frames to my old light-up disco ball and tornado lamp I had as a teenager. By the end of the day, Jake and I are both severely sunburned and exhausted. We've made good headway and got rid of a lot of stuff, but we still have about 150 DVDs to sell...

Day 2: August 17th...
Considerably slower day than the previous. We don't get our first "customer" till about 10:30. We've chalked it up to people being in church and decide to wait it out. I think we got a handful of people, and every time we decide to maybe call it a day, someone drives/walks up. Jake was selling his Playstation 2 with 4 controllers and 2 memory cards for $30 total..not a bad deal. Our last group drives up and it's two ladies and about five kids. Jake and I had started packing up the books and stuff for the Salvation Army truck coming next week. Of course, everything stops as we try to make sure these kids don't take anything. One kid sees the PS2 and asks "How much for just the memory card?" Jake says "$2/piece"...obviously it wasn't good enough for the kid. Shortly after the brood leaves, weassess the damage and discover that not only had the kid taken one memory card...he had actually snatched them both from under our noses. I felt mostly at fault because I had been standing right next to him in plain view, but was trying to watch them all, that I missed one. You can really tell the characters in life.

One man came on day #1 and saw that Jake had a box of old shirts that don't fit anymore. Well you would have sworn this guy thought he had won the lottery. He was talking all sorts of nonsense like he bought an old Bayonet knife that looked like something Crocodile Dundee would carry. This guy said "WHY ARE YOU SELLING THAT? THAT'S A PIECE OF HISTORY RIGHT THERE!!!" well, he bought the knife straight off. He came back to the house at 8:30pm that night to try to buy the shirts, but luckily our housemate caught him and told him to not bother us (yes we were sleeping we were so tired by then) and to come back the next day. Well, he did and he bought more stuff. He bought Jake's old Gameboy Color because he swore he could hook it up to be a type of Caller ID screen..whatever...scary man...

All in all, we were pretty successful...was it worth it? Worth the experience, not worth the sunburn. Would we do it again? Not for another 5-10 years. Just for the sake of not feeling like I have to do this again, I think our US economic contributions will go on a long term sabatical. No unecessary shopping...ugh...