Sister Yard Sale
Now that we're in the small time-frame of not-blizzard-not-blistering weather, you may want to venture out to do some yard sale shopping or have a sale of your own. Side note, I always catch myself saying "garage sale" even when there's not a garage in sight. Maybe that's an East Texas thing? I'll stick to "yard" for the rest of this post!
Not too long ago, my sister and I hosted our first yard sale at her new house in my hometown. We've hosted quite a few sales before, so this wasn't our first rodeo. We'd like to share what we've found that works for us. Our goal is always to get things outta our homes! A couple bucks here and there is great, but it's important to note that cash isn't our priority.
COLOR SYSTEM
We don't write prices for every single item. We have before and it's a total hassle. On the flip side, we hate shopping at sales without tags, so we don't want folks to feel the same about us. We've come up with a simple color system that works out great. We "dot" each item with a coordinating color and have signs all around the yard denoting the color prices. We also had enough tables this year to have a pink table, yellow table and green table. Sure, things get swapped around throughout the day, but overall, we trust the color system!
CLOTHING PRICES
Surprise, surprise: We don't price our clothes either. Much like the color system, signs fill the clothing areas with simple prices for each type of clothing.
Skirts: $2.00 | Dresses: $3.00 | Tops: $2.00 | Pants: $3.00
Again, when you aren't really here for the money, it makes it all that easier to let things go for a little bit cheaper than you normally would.
FREEBIE BOXES
Face it, we all have knicknacks, stocking stuffers and other useless small things laying around the house. Our "junk" may be perfect for someone else, so we keep a few super-cheap boxes near our checkout area. They say "50 cents," but we give most of the items away. Customer checks out, we say, "Please, see if there's 3 more things you want from these boxes. You can have it for free!" Boom. We get rid of it, they get it for free. It's a win-win. And very popular with the kiddos.
SPREAD IT OUT
One of the hardest parts of having a sale is getting people to stop and look! We chose to spread out items across the yard to look as "big" as we could. In doing so, it also helped people see all of the items and not have to dig around for them.
CURBSIDE PICKUP
Once your sale is complete (we were done around 3:00 p.m. that day), gather the leftovers, place them by the curb and let people know on Facebook that it's all free to pick up. We actually had a lot of things left and did not want to have to bring them back in and store them somewhere. We put the "leftovers" photo on a local trading FB page and it was all gone by morning. All we had to pack back up was our tables and tarps.
DON'T STRESS
Takes us a while to remember this one when we're worried and organizing the night before, but we tried to loosen up and have a little fun with this one. We had a great turnout thanks to some Facebook marketing (and a couple signs around town) and we freed-up some much needed space in our homes. Now if we'd just quit shopping for 5 seconds....
If you have a great yard sale tip to add, let us know in the comments below! We're always looking to improve.
