At 6:40 on Saturday morning, before I'd even carried the sign out to the corner, a minivan pulled up to our carport and a woman got out with a flashlight. She asked if we had any tools. I said we didn't open until seven. She said she knew, and kept looking.
That was the start of our fall garage sale. Six hours, two folding tables borrowed from my mom, a cash box with $60 in ones and fives, and a lot of people asking if I'd take less. Here are the numbers.
We're still renting, but after touring houses earlier this month, we're hoping to buy by spring. Every box we don't own is a box we don't have to move. Between the spare room, the shed and two boxes of our things that had been sitting in my parents' barn since 2022, we had more than I wanted to admit.
Last December I sold the best things from one closet on Facebook Marketplace, eight items for $318, and that worked well for anything worth $25 or more. But you can't list 200 little things one at a time. That's what a garage sale is for. That was my theory, anyway.
Setup cost $10: a $4 pack of price stickers and $6 in poster board for signs. I posted in our town's buy and sell group the Wednesday before, which was free. Gloria from the other half of our duplex put out a card table of her own, and her sales were hers.
What we made
| What | Sold for |
|---|---|
| Tools and garage odds and ends | $88 |
| Big things: weight bench, bike, microwave cart | $80 |
| Kitchen stuff | $74 |
| Lamps, frames and decor | $66 |
| Clothes and shoes | $58 |
| Holiday decorations | $46 |
| Total | $412 |
Minus the $10 for stickers and poster board, that's $402. The $60 of change in the cash box went back to checking, so it isn't counted either way.
For time, the sale itself was six hours for both of us, so twelve. Pricing, hauling and setting up took about seven more hours during the week before. That's 19 hours for $402, or about $21 an hour. That's more than double what my furniture flips pay, which I did not enjoy finding out.
The asking for less
Almost everybody asked. A man offered $1 for a $5 lamp and seemed hurt when I said $4. A woman wanted a whole box of Christmas decorations for $5 when they were marked a quarter apiece, and there were about 60 things in it. We met at $10. The tools were gone in the first 20 minutes, to the flashlight lady and two men who clearly do this every Saturday.
What worked was deciding ahead of time. Tyler and I agreed that until 11, we'd take any fair offer within a dollar or two. At 11, everything went half off. At 12:30, I put out a sign that said "Fill a bag, $3." That last half hour brought in $41, mostly from people stuffing grocery sacks with kitchen things and clothes.
Moose spent the whole morning inside, howling every time a car door shut.
At one o'clock we still had four boxes and about a table's worth of stuff left: mostly books, mugs, small appliances missing a part and some clothes. On Sunday afternoon we loaded it into the truck and dropped it at the thrift store donation door in Moberly, and I kept the receipt. The treadmill, which nobody looked at twice, is listed on Marketplace now.
Like the closet sale, this was our own used stuff sold for far less than we paid, so as far as we understand it, it isn't side income for tax purposes. It's on the Extra tab anyway, in its own section. On Monday the $402 went to the house fund.
Would we do it again?
Once more, probably, the spring we move. But I'd do it differently. Anything worth $25 or more goes on Marketplace first, where the closet sale made about $45 an hour. The garage sale is for everything smaller, priced to go, with the half-off hour and the bag sale planned from the start. And anything that won't sell for a dollar goes straight into a donation box, so I'm not carrying it out to the carport and back again.
Was it worth it? For $402 and a much emptier shed, yes. For $21 an hour standing in our carport while strangers offered me a dollar for things I'd already priced at two, I'd say it's worth it about once a year. Ask me again in the spring.
