A day to sell

It was the official yard sale of the year today.  My mother and I have one every year, and usually a sister or two join in.  This year we held it at our old house, hoping to generate some traffic to it since its been on the market for 6 months with no real interest. (more on that later)

Yard sales are a lot of work.  For the past two weeks I have been going through things setting stuff aside, tagging it with prices etc.  Its really a process for anyone who has small hording issues like those that run in my family.  As my mother says, "historically people were either hunters or gatherers, in our family, we must have been gatherers". So after making the decision to truly get rid of my maternity and baby clothes (again, this is a whole other blog worthy topic!)  I also went through those last few boxes from when we moved that I haven't gotten around to unpacking.

So this morning I was up bright and early, packing the last few boxes and headed over to meet my mother and sister.  As the day began, it was looking very promising.  We had put an ad in the paper and hung up signs and there were a few other local yard sales to draw more attention.  There is a whole sociological study that can be done just around yard sales and the people who shop them or those that host.

• the early birds - who know that you posted a specific time to start but disregard it in hopes that they will be the first to find that "treasure"
• the antique hunters
• the allowance shoppers - they have a set amount of money that they allow themselves to spend and have to figure out if they blow it all in one spot is it worth it incase the next place there is something better.
• no yard sale is complete without the hagglers (my family and I are not good with these people, we won't haggle... just take it!)

Then there is the whole psychology of us sellers.  Throughout the whole day my mother, sisters and I will shop on each others stuff. (we used to pay each other but over the years we just say - take it - its yours)

The best are the items that we really don't want to part with so we price them just a little to high, hoping that no one will really buy it, but we can pretend that we tried to get rid of it!

The weather turned out beautiful, the kids that attended were really well behaved and all in all, we made a few bucks and spent some quality time with each other.  The end result - we did good enough to call it a day, but not good enough to stretch it out for another day!