April Showers Bring May...... Garage Sales!

April Showers Bring May…

…garage sales!

Actually, at this point in April, the showers have been basically non-existent. Which I’ve effectively cursed by writing that so if, by the time you read this, you are up to your armpits in mud, well… a thousand pardons for uttering/typing that before the end of the month.

Last May I decided all I wanted for Mother’s Day is a decluttering of my basement, closets and house in general. Actually, what I REALLY wanted was someone else in my household to do this for me, but one must be realistic about their Mother’s Day demands. Gifts notwithstanding, with this lofty goal in mind, I decided what better time to garage sale than the annual Parade of Garage sales.

The concept of having a garage sale actually hit around Christmas so I’d spent most of the winter going through dusty boxes and cluttered closets in search of saleable treasures. It’s amazing how much easier it is to get rid of stuff you have absolutely no use for when it’s going to a good home rather than the garbage. Theoretically going to a good home, anyhow.

Not being the owner of a garage at my current house, I convinced my garage-owning friend that joining the Parade of Garage Sales would be an excellent idea. I, along with my boxes of stuff, would of course attend, resulting in double the amount of treasure in her garage to sell. This would, in turn, attract a large number of customers to buy all of our treasures. At the end of the day, we would be able to relax in her empty garage and plan what we’d do with our new-found wealth; then I’d have the pleasure of going home to my tidy house to relax. My friend, being rather full of clutter herself, was easy to convince.

The week before our epic sale-to-end-all-sales I borrowed my son’s truck and made numerous trips to my friend’s house with boxes of clutter, aka treasure. It was at that point that I discovered I have far too many books and one should be careful just how large a box is used to pack said books. I cheered myself by picturing my loot-to-be and remembering people pay money for classes with this type of resistance/cardio exercise. Extra bonus!

The night before the sale we agreed to meet in her garage and set up, which actually translated into “cleaning her garage” followed by “moving stuff from one table to the next”. This was a result of the unhappy discovery that we both had enough stuff to fill all the tables on our own and we were sadly lacking table space. After a few snarks about moving MY stuff, which was already artfully displayed, we agreed that she could have the left side tables and I would take the right side ones. We also consoled ourselves that we would have more space in the morning when we could shift some of the big items to be equally artfully displayed on the driveway.

After a few hours of cleaning, unpacking, arranging, general snarking and pricing we decided, exhausted, to call it a night and get an early start to finish our pricing. The “garage sale to end all garage sales” was turning out to be a ridiculous amount of work but we figured the payout would make it worth it.

Saturday translated into a long, exhausting day with the following “learnings”:

a)      People do not respect the 9 am start time

b)      People are cheap

c)       People would not recognize treasure if it walked up and slapped them

d)      People do not understand the concept of “artful displays” and the value it adds

e)      Packing unsold crap… uh... treasure… is as much work as moving, unpacking and pricing the same treasure.

f)       The average rate of pay, by hour, for holding a garage sale is approximately .30 cents

g)      Charities, such as Women In Need, are a great place to send good quality household items that still have life and shouldn’t be headed for the landfill. They won’t make you rich but neither will a garage sale. And they will take your good quality clutter off your hands.

No more garage sales for me!!

But… if you have some treasure and some time, I hear Langdon has one in early May. And Chestermere has one the next weekend. Then there’s Strathmore’s in June… and I kind of missed my decorative Christmas baking platter this year… anyone have one of those??