Ten best buys I've had from garage sales
Here are the 10 best buys I’ve had at a garage sale.
- Clothing. If you’re built on the smaller side, you’ll often find good used clothing at garage sales that someone else has decided to get rid of because they don’t fit it any more. If you’re not a fashion slave, the garage sales of those who are can be very rewarding indeed. Some of the best finds to date was a black turtleneck pullover and a black leather driving coat.
- Children’s toys. I might not have thought much of that pig knitted out of polyester yarn, but the children just took to it and now the very idea of getting rid of Pinky is unthinkable.
- An old set of semi-circular enamel saucepans that can be pushed together so they use less space on the top of the stove – a very efficient way to cook several dishes at once.
- A duvet cover with matching sheets and pillowcases. The floral pattern may not be to everyone’s taste, but it is to mine.
- Garden tools, especially the shovel. Garage sales are always great places to pick up equipment of this sort.
- Two wicker chairs with very faded cushions. They’re perfect for the porch in the sun – you can tell this because the cats take them over all the time.
- A pair of red sparkly high heeled shoes. They were outrageous “showgirl” shoes, but for 20c the pair, how could I resist, especially as they were in my size?
- A non-electric whistling kettle. So somebody was upgrading to an electric kettle that switches itself off. This one’s great, as it can work on gas or even on an open fire/barbecue if the electricity goes out.
- Books. I love old classic detective novels by Dorothy Sawyers and they often turn up at tag sales, as do other good deals. As the saying goes, you can’t judge a good book by its cover.
- A guitar. The strings were missing when I got it, but they’re easily replaced.
Site review: sassysigns.com
If you want to know everything there is about creating first-class signs for your garage sale and have them done professionally, this is the site for you. And sassysigns.com isn’t just for those holding a garage sale – this site can be used for creating signs of all kinds, from FSBO home sales to awareness promoting signs (e.g. for the Breast Cancer Walk).
Sassysigns is all about creating professional, fun one-of-a-kind signs with a bit of attitude. You can create your own signs, or you can order pre-printed signs with space for you to put in your details.
The signs promoted seem to be of excellent quality, but they may be a bit on the expensive side for those holding a small one-off garage sale. However, if you think it’s worth it, or if you are creating signs for a larger garage sale held by an organisation, then the signs definitely are worth it.
The site, like the signs it sells, is bright and colourful, and is very easy to navigate. The curly lettering and the cheery pink and green colour scheme may not be to everyone’s taste, but this reviewer finds it attractive. The sales area of the site is professionally done, with all the features you would expect from an online store there and working – including product reviews.
Timeline for planning your garage sale
Holding a garage sale is quite a process. If you’ve never tried it before, you might be quite surprised. This is a rough guide to getting organised for holding garage sale. Exactly how long each step will take you depends on you and how much of an organised person you are.
- Decide to hold the garage sale.
- Start finding items to be sold. Be realistic about what’s good for selling and what’s not. Obvious rubbish won’t sell. Nor will anything broken, so be fairly ruthless.
- Mention your garage sale to your friends. They may have some items they want to sell and might be able to help out.
- Set the date. Check everbody’s schedules so you don’t end up holding it on your daughter’s best friend’s birthday – if you want your daughter to help out.
- Decide on how you’re going to price everything. You will not get the “brand new” price for items, even if the item is hardly used, so be realistic.
- Start considering the logistics of the sale. Do you have enough display tables? Plastic bags? Can you duck into a carport or rig up an awning if it rains? How long will you let your sale run for?
- (At least a fortnight before). Start your publicity in the form of word-of-mouth, flyers and posters in corner store windows.
- Organise friends and family members to help out. You may have to work in shifts if some members of the family have sport or church commitments over the weekend.
- Make signs. Good quality ones get better results. Remember to list the date, place and time.
- (A week before). List your upcoming garage sale in classified advertisements and in online channels.
- Price everything. Use sticky labels. Don’t use the “everything on this table $10; everything on that table $5” method or try to rely on your memory.
- Get the cash float. Have enough handy to give change from a $100 note – you never know! Find a handy place to put the cash float. You don’t want to be ducking in and out of the house to get change, so have it handy to where the garage sale is set up.
- Organise an extension cord so buyers can try out electrical items and see that they work.
- If you’re holding the garage sale over the weekend, start putting your signs up on Thursday. If you do it on Wednesday, you may annoy a few people.
- If you plan on selling baking or coffee at your garage sale, do the baking the day before. If you’re super-organised and have been freezing muffins for sale well beforehand, defrost them the night before. Make sure you have ample supplies of paper cups, milk, sugar, tea and coffee if you’re selling hot drinks. If you’re having an old-fashioned lemonade stand in summer, make up a jug or two and refrigerate this the night before.
- (The night before) Get everything ready to put out first thing in the morning, then go to bed early after setting your alarm clock. Six o’clock in the morning is a good time for you to start setting up.
- Get up, set up tables and prepare for action! People will always turn up early – be ready for this.
Pricing items for a garage sale
The golden rule for garage sales is not to be over-optimistic and unrealistic. People visit garage sales to get bargain prices, so you can’t expect them to cough up the same amount as they would in a shop.
When you’re pricing items, keep the age of the item in mind. Things that are brand new and still have the original tags and wrappers can be sold for about 80% of the as-new price. Items that are old and battered should be sold for nowhere near the original price – more like 10% of the as-new price if not less.
For clothing, a method that often works is “fill a bag for $2”. Have the clothes for sale in a box with a collection of plastic shopping bags (identical ones, of course) nearby. Really special clothes (e.g. leather jackets) should be kept separate and priced separately.
Work in numbers that are easy to give change for – don’t mess around with the $X.99 that stores always do. Think of coin denominations as a guideline.
Offer deals like “Books 50c each, or 6 for $4”. This is especially good if you are holding the garage sale to turn unwanted clutter into cash. The idea is to get rid of the things.
Be prepared to haggle. But don’t drop below 50% of the price you have set unless you really want to get rid of the item as soon as possible.
If a lot of items are similar prices, use coloured stickers to indicate the price, and display the coding on a sign somewhere. For example, all blue-sticker items are $1, all red-sticker items are $2, all yellow-sticker items are 50c, and so on. Or else have a sign saying “plates and bowls 50c each” or “pot plants $2 each”.
Site review: www.estatesales.net
Estatesales.net is a US-based site dedicated to estate sales. Estate sales held by individuals as well as companies are listed on the site, and the site also allows estate auctions to be listed.
For those wanting to list an estate sale, using estatesales.net is very easy. The first step is to sign up, which can be done for free. Companies and individuals can sign up to list their sale. Sales throughout the USA – including Alaska and Hawaii, but not territories such as Puerto Rico – are listed, and are categorised further by city as well as by state.
If you wish to search for sales in your area, again, estatesales.net is simple to use. Select the state you are in then refine it further by city. You will then be presented with a list of sales in the area. If no sales are on in the area, the site will let you know – and will invite you to subscribe to a mailing list to be notified about when sales are on in your area. You will also be told how many other subscribers are in your area – this is very handy for those wishing to list an estate sale, as they will know how many people will be notified automatically about the sale.
If you search for sales, you can also filter the results by type of sale. Options for filtering include estate sales, moving sales, auctions and store sales.
You can also use estatesales.net to find companies who can handle the estate sale for you if you don’t want to go down the garage sale channel. As estatesales.net is independent, it does not push one particular company over another, but it gives you the opportunity to choose. A list of handy tips for dealing with and choosing companies is included (which has pieces of advice ranging from how pricing works to “do not throw anything away before meeting with the companies”). Users are able to locate companies in their area in the same way as they would locate sales: by clicking the relevant state and then refining by city.
The overall tone of the site is very businesslike and professional and no-nonsense. Unlike other sites, it keeps things neutral and somewhat impersonal rather than cheerful and gossipy. However, it is very easy to navigate and to use. The site is attractively laid out and all buttons and menu tabs are easy to read. On the date of that this reviewer explored the site, all the links were operating without any “oops this page appears to be missing” problems.
One of the downsides is that not all sales are listed on the site. When this reviewer gave the site a trial run using a random state (Hawaii), no estate sales were listed at all in any city. For the city of Boston, only four estate sales were listed, all of which were posted by companies rather than individuals. However, all areas investigated by this reviewer had subscribers listed that would be notified of the sale, so signing up and listing your estate sale on this site is not a waste of time – the process is quick and easy (as well as free) and will help get the message about your tag sale out there.
How to promote your garage sale
These days, you have a number of options when it comes to publicity for your garage sale. The methods you choose really depend on a number of things.
If you are selling your items as part of an organised boot sale, tag sale or flea market held regularly or as part of a school/church/club fundraiser, a lot of the publicity will be taken care of for you. However, if you’re the person in charge of the publicity (someone has to do it), you’ll have to think about how you’ll go about it. Schools can rely on the old-fashioned method of Taking Home Notes To Parents via “pupil post” as a way of generating initial interest, and most organisations use the letterbox drop method of publicity. However, for a multi-person “garage sale” you can also consider writing up an article for a community newspaper. Small local papers are usually hungry for “copy” and if you come up with an interesting and entertaining article with some good pictures, then the editor is highly likely to run the story, giving you a bit of free publicity. If your tag sale is likely to have other highlights (e.g. buskers, bouncy castles, conjurers, a band, a sausage sizzle, face painting), then mention these in the article.
Another tip for large garage sales run by organisations is to notify local businesses. For a nominal fee, the local businesses can have a “spot” where they can promote their business (note to businesses: sponsoring a school or charity garage sale is a good way of getting your name out there that is good value for money).
Individuals holding the traditional type of yard sale where it’s just one or two families selling off odds and ends probably don’t have the same “audience appeal” as the larger ones, so the options of community newspapers and local businesses won’t work as well. However, these places for promoting your garage sale work well:
If you have a particularly large garage sale (e.g. an estate sale), then it may be worth printing out A5 flyers and dropping these in letterboxes around your neighbourhood. This takes a fair bit of organisation – not to mention paper and printer ink – but does get the news out there.
- Signs on your fence and on lamp-posts. Make sure these are good quality, not just tatty bits of cardboard with marker pen. If you live on a quiet cul-de-sac, then put some of your signs on a main street nearby so you catch the eye of more people.
- Newspaper classified ads often have a section for listing garage sales.
- Some special garage sale websites have places you can list upcoming garage sales
- Networking sites such as Facebook and Bebo – announce your garage sale to the world!
- Word of mouth advertising. You have told all your friends and acquaintances, haven’t you?
- Community noticeboards outside supermarkets, etc. People do read these. Also consider workplace noticeboards, if your workplace policy allows this. Another version of this is the advertisement printed and taped to the window of the local corner store. Ask permission first.
Site review: www.yardsalequeen.com
Yardsalequeen.com is very informal, bright, cheerful and chatty and makes a fun read even if you aren’t planning on either holding or visiting a garage sale. Each page is packed with personal stories and anecdotes. And the site has a real sense of humour, which is one of the most likeable things about the site.
Yardsalequeen.com has a lot of useful advice for both those holding garage sales as well as for what the Yard Sale Queen calls “yardsailors.” The advice ranges from tips on how to hold a sale to revolting things she has seen for sale that should be avoided (e.g. dentures). Links to other garage sale sites, including a sign provider (with a useful coupon for a discount), are also easy to find.
The site’s layout could be better, but if you dislike page after page of plain black and white text on the screen, this is one downside of the “tips” pages – the list of tips is quite long, but only the standard site graphic is shown at the top of the page. The advice is well worth reading, but can get a bit hard on the eyes. The blog and the “bad signs” pages come complete with graphics – the examples of good signs and atrocious signs are a good chuckle. One page is dedicated to YouTube clips and is entirely there for amusement purposes.
This is not the site to use if you want to find garage sales in your area or if you want to list your sale, but it is well worth viewing for entertainment value as well as the excellent advice.
Holding a garage sale with friends
Often, one single household by itself doesn’t always have enough unwanted goods to really hold a worthwhile garage sale. In this case, clubbing together with another household to run a combined garage sale is often a good way to go about it. Two families means twice as many hands to actually run the garage sale – a real bonus.
However, you want to stay friends at the end of the sale, which means you’ll need to sort out a few things beforehand.
· How will the money be divided? If you both have contributed roughly equally (both effort and items), then split the proceeds of the garage sale 50-50.
· If both or one household contributes a large item (or several large items), make a list of all these, along with the prices of each one. This way, you can keep track of how much money the original owner should end up with. If the item sells for less than the marked price, then make a note of this (keep a notebook). Don’t sell a nearly-new exercise machine priced at $50 for $25 without asking the original owner if this is OK with them first.
· What will happen to any items left over? Will they go back to the original owners or will the whole lot go to the nearest charity store – or will the items get packed away for another garage sale at a later date?
· How will you take care of yourselves during the sale? Who will provide the food and drink? It can be a good idea for one family to host the sale and the other to take care of the edibles – the host family will be the ones having to set up at the crack of dawn, so this is fair.
· Will any children need to be taken to sports matches, playdates, etc.? Arrange a car pool between you, if needed.
Hot finds for fitness fans at garage sales
Garage sales are great places for those who want to get fit. No, I’m not talking about the benefits of walking from sale to sale and toting your new-found treasures as a form of exercise –although it certainly counts – but the great deals you can get on exercise-related equipment. How many people do you know that have unused exercise equipment sitting around their homes? Right, now think of how many people there must be trying to sell off unused equipment by having a garage sale – often at prices far below the bought-new price.
These items are usually good deals to pick up at garage sales:
- exercise machines of all shapes and sizes, including older exercise bikes. If it still works, it can still get you in shape, even if it does date back to the 1980s.
- exercise DVDs and videos. Check them over to make sure they’re not scratched before you shell out your cash.
- exercise-related books: the actual exercise regimens never go out of date, even if the pages are a bit dog-eared and the models demonstrating the routines are wearing hideous leg warmers.
- balls of all types. From Swiss exercise balls to little squash balls, as long as they’re still inflated/inflatable, they’re bound to be a bargain.
- weights. Dumbbells never go out of date. If you’re really lucky, you can find some from a reputable brand that can easily be added to.
- workout wear made from fleece.
- specialty shoes, such as football boots. This especially applies to children’s sports shoes.
- any specialist sports gear, including golf clubs, hockey sticks, tennis racquets, etc. Finding a good deal at a garage sale might even trigger a new sporting interest.
- reflective gear for running and walking in the dark
These aren’t such a good deal, though, unless you’re really lucky:
- Used general-purpose exercise trainers. If a pair of running shoes look a bit down at heel and have signs of wear and tear on the sole, they won’t give your joints the protection they need. The imprints made by other people’s feet will feel weird. Only buy used trainers if they’re hardly worn.
- Videos, tapes and LPs that you don’t have players for anymore. Sure, you have memories of doing the Jane Fonda workout ages ago and you’ve decided to go retro for your workout, but if you can’t play it, you’re wasting your time.
- Lycra clothing. If it’s been worn a lot, it will have stretched and sagged irreparably. You may be lucky, but you may not. Avoid anything with holes in. The same applies to swimwear – never buy used swimwear in a pale colour, as it will become see-through as soon as it gets wet.
- Sweat bands: These are probably packed with someone else’s sweat and grime. Ick.
- Half-used protein supplements. If you really can’t resist it, make sure you (a) read the package carefully and see exactly what the supplement’s supposed to do, (b) check the use-by date.
Do not buy these things at a garage sale
Garage sales are great – you can find nearly anything under the sun in them at absolute bargain prices. However, while most of the finds at garage sales are worthwhile buys and well worth snapping up, there are some items you should stay away from – if they’re put up for sale at a yard sale at all.
- Firearms. It’s better to get these from a proper dealer, especially firearms you need a licence to buy.
- Child’s safety seats. You don’t know the history of these if they’re just put up with a sticker on at a garage sale. If they’ve been in an accident or are over a certain age, they shouldn’t be used as they are unsafe.
- Safety helmets for bikes, motorbikes or horses. Once again, if these have taken a blow in an accident and done their job, they won’t be able to do the job effectively again. And with garage sales, you just don’t know where they’ve been.
- Electric blankets. These need to be properly checked to ensure that they’re safe. If you see one for an absolute steal, get it properly checked out before you use it. Otherwise, buy something else – a hot water bottle, a wheat-pack or a good thick blanket.
- Ancient and mysterious garden chemicals. If these are being sold off in a garage sale as part of someone’s estate, they are likely to be very old and they could contain substances that are now in the banned list.