Garage Sale Fail

Last weekend, Curt and I had a garage sale...a first for us...and, perhaps our last!

It was a multi-family garage sale; the lady across the street, Bonnie, and our next door neighbour, Len, both had stuff out as well.  I think Bonnie probably had the most success - she had a lot of 'bigger' items, and got rid of most of them.  Len, like us, had mostly smaller stuff and I don't think he did too well.

The forecast for Saturday wasn't great, but Bonnie was determined to go ahead with things anyway, so we just went along with it.  And, when we woke up at 6:30am, it was looking pretty grey and it was pretty chilly.  But, we set to work and got all set up.  We had decided not to price each item individually, instead, we set up four separate tables...we had a $0.50 table, a $1 table, a $2 table and a $5 table.  Oh, and we had a book table too.  So, as we were taking things out of boxes, we just placed it on the appropriate table...it made setting up pretty quick and easy!  We had a few other items that we priced individually, but they were larger, so we could place them on the driveway or the garden wall on their own.

A picture of our set up - from the garage, looking down the driveway...

Notice the redneck tables we used!  Old pails served as the legs, and sheets of plywood created the table tops.  The table we used for the books, borrowed from another neighbour.

We had advertised that the sale would start at 8am, and people started arriving right around that time...which was a relief because we weren't ready for any 'early bird' shoppers.

After we got things set up, Curt puttered around in the garage and ended up pulling out a few more items to add.  As he was doing that, he priced a few items by sticking a piece of duct tape on the piece and writing the price on the duct tape.  At one point, he placed the half roll of duct tape on the $0.50 table and walked away...well, one of the 'shoppers' spotted it and bought it!  Ha!  So then, Curt remembered that he had a case of duct tape in the garage (courtesy of my Aunt Mary!), so he pulled out a few more rolls, just to see if they would sell....and they did!  Overall, I think the duct tape was the best seller of the day!  And the second best seller of the day, golf balls!  Curt had made bags of a dozen mixed golf balls...just old scuffed balls that we aren't likely to use...and I think all but one of those sold.

Unfortunately, the dark clouds rolled in around 10am or 10:30am...

Once these clouds rolled in, we started getting nervous!  We made room in the garage so we were prepared to just pull the tables inside if we needed to.

About half an hour later, the rain started, so we quickly pulled some plastic over the tables to see how long it would last...

The rain got pretty heavy for awhile, so we figured anyone that had been out for garage sales, had probably gone home for the day.  So, when the rain slowed down a bit, we started pulling things into the garage and called it a day.

At that point, the plan was to pull everything back out today to try again.  But, the weather forecast wasn't great...they were calling for more rain!  And, it's 5pm now and it still hasn't rained?!?!  Oh well, it was dry, but it wasn't really that nice out either.

Now we have to decide if we leave the tables set up in the garage (making it impossible to get in and out of the garage or to access anything inside) and try again in a few weeks...or, if we should just box everything up and donate it somewhere.