I talked my mom into hosting the yard sale. We discuss having a yard sale at least once a year and this is the first time in a decade that we actually pulled it all together. At our last yard sale one of my best friends brought all of her used underwear to sell. I was shocked...I would never buy a stranger's used underwear...I mean you can buy it pretty cheap (and most importantly - unworn!) at WalMart already. This wasn't fancy stuff, it was plain white cotton undies. Guess what people swarmed all over? That's right, her underwear. She sold every last pair immediately. I still don't have the gumption to sell my worn out panties.
On the actual yard sale day yesterday, people started stopping by 40 minutes before the actual start time (which is normal...which is why we set up 45 minutes early). Yard salers are an entirely different breed of person. They all knew each other, if something was more than a $1 they didn't want it, and many were looking for hidden treasures they could sell for a fortune on eBay. Unfortunately for them we aren't stupid and sold that stuff ourselves on eBay long ago. They rifled through our junk, fondled everything, and bought very little. The stuff that I thought would sell didn't and the essentially garbage that I put out did sell (Used Christmas cards? One lady bought them ALL...but expensive handbags that I was selling for $3? Now at Goodwill).
The negotiators always make me laugh. A woman looked at mom's Pottery Barn rugs. There were three rugs and mom had priced them at $5 each. This woman made an offer we couldn't refuse, "I only want two rugs, will you take $10 for them?" Um, yes.
We promised that we would take nothing back home so we piled everything into cars to haul to Goodwill. As we were getting ready to leave a tremendous tractor trailer slowly inched its way down mom's neighborhood street. People were coming out to see why this truck was crawling down the street (not much happens in mom's neighborhood...). They were selling furniture off the back of the truck. They gave us some made up spiel about why they had all of this high end furniture that they were selling off the back of the truck. Being a sucker for any type of shopping I climbed aboard to check out their wares (after I made the man reassure me that he wasn't going to trap me in there and sell me into slavery or something like that). I am now the proud owner of a settee that I bought from clean cut gypsies out of the back of a truck. I guess my next purchase will be a designer watch that I buy out of some guy's trench coat.
Those yard sale dollars I earned lasted all of 10 minutes.
Oh, and the new settee is completely unusable because Phoebe immediately claimed it as her own.
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