Xiaoniu 小妞

Last Saturday was the annual neighborhood yard sale. I decided this time last year that I was going to participate in order to get rid of some stuff. Seeing as I didn’t have much stuff mom and dad gave me a few boxes when they moved and Amy gave me a few items that she no longer wanted. In all I had enough stuff to fill two tables with a number of items on the ground below. It felt good and we did okay.

Seeing as having a toddler around would not have made selling anything easier Sue and Emelia made themselve scarce for the weekend. That gave me the time to get ready for the sale and to work the sale on Saturday. I spent Friday night going through the stuff, organizing and pricing each item. Saturday morning I started around 8:30, a half hour before the official start time of 9:00.

Throughout the day I had my share of each type of shopper. A few guys showed up trying to get me to sell “my wife’s” jewelry. Some were looking for coins, boxes of DVDs, boxes of books or hunting gear. Sorry, no, no, no and no. We had mostly kitchen items and this-and-that. We had the full price payers, the frugal bargainers and the down right annoying bargainers. The item is $10 I’ll give you $5. How  about $8? OK. The annoying bargainers say things like “All of these are $0.25 each, I’ll give you $0.25 for all of them.” No thanks.

I also saw my share of neighbors. Some were actual shoppers, some were just nosey and wanted to see what I had out for sale. One of the higher up managers from work even stopped by. And strangely enough somebody from Mass. stopped by for a peak. I had to ask if she drove all the way out for the sale. The woman happened to be out in our area to drop her so off for school. She came all the way out from Sandwich, MA.

By noon things got really slow and I got really bored. By 2:00 I started to clean up and get ready to go in for the day. I put together a bunch of things and popped them into boxes marked free. Nobody stopped even though I put the boxes at the end of the driveway. Once I packed up the rest of the stuff, put it inside and closed the garage doors people stopped by to grab the freebies. I took a walk around the neighborhood to see the remaining sales and by the time I got back about half the free stuff went. Less stuff to toss out at the end of the day.

I made okay money despite selling most things for $1 or less. I had a few big ticket items, but not many. One of the three microwaves went to a young woman. The tires (yes, the tires from my old truck) finally went to some guy. The tonneau went to somebody else. And lots of small stuff was sold.

All in all it was a good sale and I was glad to be rid of stuff. Better to sell than throw it out. I don’t plan to make this a yearly event in our house. Not because I didn’t enjoy myself, I simply don’t have that much extra crap to get rid of.