Getting Rid of Junk

Since the hubby and I agreed to the possibility of taking in a friend of ours as a temporary roommate, we've been doing our best to weed through some of our crap stuff and get rid of things that we don't really need or haven't used in a while. 

So, this past weekend while the hubby's parents were out of town, we hijacked their house & driveway and had a little yard sale. Technically the hubby had been staying at his parent's house all week to take care of their 5 cats, so I guess we really didn't hijack anything. But, considering we live in an apartment complex, a driveway was necessary to put our plan in action of getting rid of junk and making a little extra cash.

After the wedding we had been slowly working our way through the boxes in our guest bedroom closet to see what we could get rid of and what could be paired down into smaller/less boxes. If you remember from when we first moved in, the closet was looking a little something like this:

Just imagine that there are two doors leaning against that back wall, and you've pretty much got a before picture of that closet. Sorry, but I don't have an after to show at this point. So, once we had things set aside for the yard sale, we started transporting it to Orlando one car load at a time. Since the hubby is still working in Orlando until he starts his new job, it wasn't that far out of the way for him to swing by and drop off a couple of boxes. And one weekend my mom came and picked me up, so we loaded her car up with some boxes as well. It maybe took 3 trips in total to get everything down there?

When we got it all to his parents house, we stored it all in the hubby's old bedroom.

Then we headed over to Wally World to pick up some supplies for making signs. We picked up a 5-pack of fluorescent poster boards, 4 wooden stakes (which had a self-adhesive sticky side that made things so much easier!), and a 2-pack of Sharpie markers.

I used the front packaging of the posters to practice the sizing & spacing of the signs. As you can see, I messed up the first time around. I also laid some newspaper underneath the poster boards to make sure there wasn't any bleeding through onto the table cloth.

We ended up putting all 5 signs out (4 on the streets & 1 inside the neighbor to direct). Initially I thought it was a good idea to write the address of my in-laws home on the signs. But I came to regret that later. Maybe I'm a little paranoid, but when it was time to go to sleep, I was afraid that people would try to break into the house to get the stuff/money from the yard sale. Don't ask why. It's not like people make a ton of money on these things, and its not like they are selling top-dollar items, but it still creeped me out. Plus, we had posted the address on Craigslist to advertise the yard sale. When we have another yard sale, I think we'll just put the name of the street and leave off the house number. (And yes, we took down the Craigslist ad as soon as the yard sale was over.)

Our setup was simple - create aisles that people would walk up & down and try to group things into 'like' categories. As much as I hate when people put things on the ground on random blankets, we ran out of tables and had to resort to the same tactic.

 The first day we made about $50 and my mom made about $15 (she brought over some of her stuff to sell as well). It was nonstop traffic, which was nice.  Sunday on the other hand was really ssslllllooooowww. We maybe had 7 people come on Sunday. Needless to say, the second day wasn't a big money maker. But, we did manage to get rid of a lot of junk. And what didn't sell got loaded into my mom's car and was taken to a local thrift store donation bin. It was nice to come home to a little less clutter.

All in all, we considered the yard sale to be a success. We met a lot of interesting people. I got a little sunburn (not hard with my paleness). And we got a little extra dough out of it too.

Anyone else out there have a yard sale recently? Or maybe you're like some of our 'customers' who said that they really need to go ahead and have one of their own?