Last week, I read a great blog post from Kelly of Eclectically Vintage, who wrote the do’s and don’ts of having a killer yard sale. Lots of great tips and pointers, including “Enlist Friends-the more hoarders the better!” and “Purge-be ruthless”. You can read the blog post in its entirety here:
This past weekend, I made sure we followed all the pointers as we prepped for our barn sale. As you know, I’ve been bugging Coach to clean out the junk which has now spilled out of the barn, into the yard, onto the porch and into my dining room…which is starting to drive me just a little bonkers.
But, I am giving him a pass for now because we are starting an exciting new venture very shortly-for which we need mucho stuff-more about that soon!!! So, over the past couple of months, Coach has been hosting barn sales on intermittent Fridays and Sundays, with some good success, but I kept asking him why he didn’t want to do Saturdays, like all the other thousands of people in our town. Misery loves company, right? Lots of our friends kept saying they wanted to come, but couldn’t because they were working. (Of course, Coach, being a teacher, has a little more spare time to hang out and sell stuff.) He kept saying that it was because he wanted to sell on a day when no one else was, so there was less competition. Hmmm. This past weekend, it finally dawned on me that the real reason he didn’t want to open up shop on Saturdays was so that he could go pickin’ at the thousands of other yard sales to replenish the stuff he sold on Fridays! This past week, when he said he wanted to do another Friday yard sale, I told him I wasn’t going to help because it was dumb. But of course, I did. And he did OK, but the traffic just wasn’t there like it normally is. So, he begrudgingly decided to forgo his Saturday pickin’ and keep selling stuff for another day. FINALLY, I figured that would show him that Saturdays were definitely the way to go when you want to do some serious selling!! Signs in place all over the neighborhood, postings on Craigslist and Facebook (just to let all our friends who said they always wanted to come but couldn’t because they were working…) Up at the crack of dawn Saturday morning, we dragged everything back out into the driveway and waited for the hoards of shoppers.
And waited. Typically, when you post an 8 am start for a yard sale, the serious shoppers start showing up around 6:45-7am (which is what Coach would have been doing if he wasn’t sitting in our driveway awaiting the rush of pickers). And waited. By 8:15, when only ONE person had stopped, I began to notice that not only was there no yard sale traffic, there was actually no street traffic! We live on kind of a busy street, where usually only Sunday mornings are quiet. And waited. Where was everybody?!? Ah…the Saturday of the week of the 4th of July would be a great time to take a family vacation, am I right? Which means that the folks who are normally browsing through junk on a Saturday morning were actually sitting on a beach on the Cape or Maine, enjoying the gorgeous sunny weather and having their first BBQ of the summer.
Woops, didn’t count on that. Well, the good news is that we still managed to sell quite a bit of stuff, and I managed to get in about three hours of gardening to clear the path to the barn that was almost jungle-like. The bad news is that Coach went out on Sunday and found some sales and came home with more stuff. Just can’t win. So, if you’re in the market for a cute kid’s Red Sox table and chairs,
or a vintage robin’s-egg-blue-chalk-painted cabinet with a tin paneled door (painted by me, of course : )
let me know-they’re still available. And, if you’re one of the lucky ones to be sitting on a beach somewhere sipping a margarita, have a great vacation week! And no worries, we will be back in August with yet another yard sale-but most likely on a Friday… Have a sunny Monday, everyone! Susan
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