Lessons Learned from My First Garage Sale

Did I say my "first" garage sale? My husband says I must call it my "only" garage sale, because I'm not allowed to ever have another one as long as I'm married to him. Like it was that much of a bother to move the dining-room table outside to the driveway. Plus all those other tables and dusty exercise-equipment monstrosities that he had to bring up from the basement. He wasn't the one who spent days cleaning old toys and figuring out how much to charge for things like unused Yankee Candles and Winnie the Pooh-shaped Wilton cake pans. I did most of the work.

My garage sale was a fundraiser for The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society, and it quickly turned into a big deal because we had items donated from six other households. I have no idea if my results are typical of garage sales in general. Perhaps my customers were more generous because they knew we were donating all the money.

My garage sale was on the Friday and Saturday before Labor Day, and despite the 95-degree heat, we raised $720. Almost $100 of that was from donations. We had a donations jar and also sold about twenty paper "Light the Night" balloons, each worth a one-dollar donation.

I was amazed that some things sold as well as they did, and surprised to learn that no one in their right mind wants to buy a perfectly good non-flat-screen television set for $5. Seriously! $5 "or best offer"! Those TVs sat, neglected, in the sun for two days, and no one made an offer. We would have sold them for a quarter on Saturday afternoon.

That's Garage Sale Lesson #1: Sorry, but no one wants your old TV.

Lesson #2: Any men's T-shirt, even an ugly black one with "South Padre Island" written in fluorescent letters that look like angry slash marks, will sell-and sell quickly-for 50 cents.

Lesson #3: Women's clothes, even your lovely Lands' End Shetland wool sweater and your husband's co-worker's wife's nice American Eagle winter coat, will not sell at your garage sale. Well, you might sell a few women's things, but don't get your hopes up.

Lesson #4: Kids' pajama sets are in high demand; we sold all of ours for 50 cents/pair. Most of the other kids' clothing also sold. We priced kids' T-shirts at 25 cents and kids' khaki or denim bottoms at 75 cents. It took forever, but someone did finally buy my daughter's adorable burgundy corduroy jumper and pink turtleneck outfit (only worn twice!) for $1.50. I also sold my old tan-and-white faux fur coat (circa 1983) for $5.

Lesson #5: Oh my gosh, people still have VCRs in 2011! We sold almost all of the VHS tapes we put out for 25 cents each.

Lesson #6: Remember The Wiggles? Those Australians who wore red, yellow, purple, and blue shirts, and danced and sang about fruit salad and hot potatoes, and hung out with Dorothy the Dinosaur and Wags the Dog and Henry the Octopus--remember them? They were huge with the toddler crowd when my son was 3. Well, at my recent garage sale I learned that nobody wants Wiggles backpacks or Wiggles DVDs. And that made me sad because I always liked The Wiggles, especially Greg in the yellow shirt.

Lesson #7: Instead of taking all your old books to Half-Price Books, where you'll be lucky to get $5 for the whole lot, sell them at your garage sale. I sold our entire box of gently-used children's books ("25 cents unless otherwise marked") to one woman. We sold tons of grown-up books, too-50 cents for hardbacks and 25 cents for paperbacks. No one quibbled with those prices.

Lesson #8: Kids' wooden puzzles sold like crazy for $1 apiece. Even our used jigsaw puzzles sold easily in the 25-50 cent range, and no one even asked if all the pieces were intact.

Lesson #9: Mint-condition stuffed animals aren't as easy to sell as I thought they'd be. I didn't sell any Beanie Babies until I marked them half price. No one wanted my daughter's gorilla, or my old doggie (who looked brand-new), or the never-been-played-with elephant puppet.

Lesson #10: Don't get sad when your nice items don't sell, because sometimes people will buy your weird stuff and love it. One gentleman who walked into my garage looking for guns (which we didn't have, except for my sterling silver revolver earrings on sale for a quarter-those made him laugh) ended up buying a wood carving that my father-in-law donated to the sale. It looked like an Ent from Lord of the Rings (and it probably was; my father-in-law is a J.R.R. Tolkien fanatic). The man said he was going to put the "Ent" in his water garden and tell everyone that he carved it himself. By the way, isn't it illegal to sell guns in a garage sale?!

Lesson #11: Sometimes people will buy stuff even when they don't know what it is. I couldn't explain the function of half of my husband's slightly-outdated electronic gizmos sitting out in front of the untouched TVs, but people bought them anyway, probably because they were super-cheap.

Lesson #12: You never know who you'll meet at your garage sale. The man who bought my unopened gift package of dog-themed Christmas ornament frames was full of surprises. He whipped out his wallet to show us a picture of his Pomeranian, dressed in a frilly red and white dress. He planned to put pictures of his dog in all the ornament frames, you see. He boasted that his dog had just won "Best Dressed" at a recent weekend spa retreat for dogs and their owners. I never would have met this man or seen pictures of his dog or learned that spa retreats for dogs even exist, if not for my garage sale.

Lesson #13: Things that don't sell on the first day of your garage sale might sell easily on the second day if you mark down the prices. That's how I sold my expensive cashmere scarf (tags still on) that Macy's accidentally sent us two years ago. We never paid for the scarf in the first place, so I didn't mind letting it go for a measly $5.

Lesson #14: Most people don't want to spend more than $5 for any single garage sale item. Our biggest-ticket item that actually sold was a LeapPad package which included the Spider-Man LeapPad learning system, eight cartridges, ten books, and a carrying case for everything. It was in immaculate condition (because it was donated from another household; if my kids had played with it, it would not have looked so good). We sold all the LeapPad stuff for $50, to the same man who bought my four boxes of old "okay" baseball cards from 1986-1991 for $10. And he made an additional two-dollar donation on top of that.

Lesson #15: If someone is willing to pay $1 or more for your old, heavy exercise equipment, and then haul it away in their own truck, that's a bargain! Maybe, if you're lucky, your guilt over never using the exercise equipment in the first place will go away, too.

Lesson #16: Sell food and drink at your garage sale/fundraiser. My friend sold most of the slices of homemade date-nut bread she brought to our garage sale on Friday, and my son raised $15 by selling cups of lemonade and Gatorade on Saturday morning.

Lesson #17: I am glad I didn't spend any money advertising our garage sale in the local newspaper. We had tons of customers who simply followed the signs to our house. No one told me that they saw our garage sale advertised on Craigslist (which is free), so I don't know if our Craigslist ad made a difference. Since our garage sale was a fundraiser for The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society, I let our local LLS chapter know about it, and they promised to advertise our sale on their Facebook page. I didn't hear from anyone who found us through the LLS's ad, but I'm sure it didn't hurt.

Lesson #18: There are probably a few husbands out there, somewhere, who enjoy having garage sales. Any husband who hates garage sales-who gets seriously depressed whenever he thinks a garage sale customer is judging him based on the state of his home and yard and the particular items he's trying to sell-should be allowed to disappear during the sale as long as he helps with the set-up and take-down of the sale. Despite the fact that my husband has forbidden me from ever having another garage sale, I couldn't have had my one and only garage sale/fundraiser without his help.