At 5:50 a.m. last Saturday, it was still dark, the yard was wet and Wes was carrying our old dresser across the carport by himself because he said it was faster than waiting for me. By 6:05 we had two folding tables set up at the end of the driveway, and by 6:15 the first truck had already pulled in. Yard sale people do not sleep.
By noon, we had $412 in a coffee can. That money is going to the beach in June.
We're splitting a Myrtle Beach condo with my old high-school friend Kayla and her husband Dwayne the first weekend of June. It's more than our usual motel, and I'd been trying to figure out how to fit it into our $3,000 trip budget for the year without cutting another trip. Meanwhile, the shed and spare bedroom were full of things we hadn't touched in years. It seemed like the two problems could solve each other.
What we sold
I priced everything on Thursday evening with masking tape and a marker, and I priced it to sell. The goal was an empty shed, not top dollar. Here's roughly how the $412 broke down:
- The old dresser from the spare room: $55
- An exercise bike we used for one winter: $75
- Wes's spare fishing gear (four rods, three reels, a tackle bag and a cast net): $96
- Kitchen things (a bread machine, mixing bowls, mismatched glasses, a slow cooker we had two of): $41
- Clothes and shoes: $48
- Christmas decorations we never put up anymore: $29
- Books, DVDs and puzzles: $33
- A nightstand and two lamps: $35
The fishing gear was a long conversation. Wes fishes the Lumber River for bream and catfish, and he has his good rods, which were never on the table. But over the years he'd collected spares from his father, from cousins and from deals he couldn't pass up. He set everything out on the bed in the spare room and picked his favorites like a man choosing which children to keep. The rest went in a box. A man from Red Springs bought most of it in the first hour and they stood talking about the river for twenty minutes.
What worked
We put up three signs on Thursday, at the end of our road and at the two closest crossroads, made from poster board left over from a church thing. Our road is a two-lane state road with steady traffic, so the signs did most of the work. I also posted it in a local buy-and-sell group the night before with a few photos.
Starting at 6 a.m. was the right call. The serious buyers come early, and by 9 they're gone. Our best hour was 6:15 to 7:15, when about half the money came in. After 10 it was mostly people slowing down, looking and driving on.
We kept a coffee can with $40 in small bills and quarters for change. Wes ran the money and I ran the talking, which is the right division of labor in our house.
At 11:30, I marked everything half off. At noon, we loaded what was left into the CR-V and dropped it at a donation center in Laurinburg on the way to my mother's house.
Where the money went
That afternoon, I deposited the $412 straight into the trip account. I didn't let it sit in checking where it could turn into groceries.
The condo is $188 a night split two ways, so our share of the bed for two nights is $188. With gas to Myrtle Beach and back and our part of the groceries and suppers, I expect our total for the weekend to land somewhere around $300. The yard sale covers all of it, with some left over toward the summer.
That also means our regular $250 monthly transfer for June has room for something else, which with gas creeping up this spring I'm glad to have.
Mr. Earl came over around 8, looked at everything, bought nothing and took home a puzzle we gave him for free. He said he'd done a yard sale once in 1987 and never again. After standing in a wet yard at dawn, I understood exactly what he meant.
The shed has a floor again, the spare room has space for a guest and the beach weekend is paid for. Wes is already looking at the garage-sale listings for next weekend. I told him he can look. He cannot buy fishing rods.
