Yard sales

I’m not a big fan of yard sales.

I do not rise early on weekends to catch the best ones in the neighborhood. I don’t scan Facebook groups for promotions of upcoming sales near me. I am not excited about the prospects of having to put one on myself.

But last weekend shifted my attitude a little, and I decided that a yard sale isn’t so bad – if your kids do all the work.

We last had a yard sale about eight or nine years ago. We had moved all our stuff into our current home without Marie Kondo-ing out the non-essentials. It was a local move that we accomplished mostly with three boys and a pickup truck, calling in a mover for the big stuff at the end.

Our house has a huge storage area in the finished basement, which allowed us to sit on the extra stuff way longer than we should have, and the yard sale, while exhausting, helped us pare down quite a bit.

Time has a way of refilling your basement, however, particularly after we moved Carla’s mom to the area after selling her house and most of her stuff. On top of that, I have a son with an interest in buying old things and fixing them up as a hobby. Which is great when he has time to actually fix up stuff and sell it.

But when he was a college student, he didn’t have time or space for such a hobby. This meant my basement filled up with a collection of junk furniture that he intended to get to some day.

Apparently, that day was after he graduated from college. So part of his downtime after receiving his diploma from UGA on May 10 and before starting his job at said UGA June 17 has been spent on the pile of projects in the basement. Before he could get to the workbench and tools, though, he had to make room.

Under Carla’s supervision, he sorted all of the stuff into three piles: sell, keep, and throw away. The “keep” pile included stuff we would retain in our home and stuff he would take with him to his new dwelling when he gets one with a workshop space. This is the part I found most exciting.

The money made from the sale was the least important benefit to me. Carla and I agreed to let the two boys still in this country (Harris is studying abroad this summer in the Republic of Georgia) who did all the work split the proceeds. It was by no means a large haul, but it gave them a little pocket change. 

They also debated the finer points of microeconomics as they negotiated with customers. When I was a pre-teen and my family moved from Texas to Florida, I remember having to price everything with stickers and masking tape labels. Apparently now, that’s too much hassle. The boys just set the stuff out and if someone wanted something they asked how much it costs.

This extended to negotiations Carla was conducting with customers over Facebook. She was at the church setting up for a baby shower and was not with us, allowing us to unknowingly bid down prices against ourselves. Not an effective strategy if you want to make money, but a good approach if the goal is to unload stuff.

Carlton was in it to make money. He texted Carla and asked her to stop starting the price negotiation so low. He and Barron argued about the same issue every time we sold a piece of furniture. In his defense, Carlton knew we were going to donate what we didn’t sell, so either way it was going away. What Barron tried to convince him was that $2 was more than $0 if we set a price too high and a customer walked away. (This argument is ongoing, so please don’t bring it up with them in my presence.)

In the “pros” and “cons” list of having a yard sale, the biggest “pro” for me was getting to see and talk to neighbors. We’ve become too isolated and busy to actually talk to the people who live around us, and it was nice to see friends I hadn’t spoken to in awhile and catch up.

So if you are contemplating having a yard sale, I will acknowledge it is a lot of work. Here’s my simple plan for making it easier: Have a bunch of kids. Wait 15 to 20 years. Make them pull everything up out of the basement and stage it in the driveway. Announce your sale on Facebook. Talk to old friends. Rake in giant piles of cash.

See how easy it is?