11 March 2013

Community Garage Sale Day

This weekend just gone, our little town hosted a Community Garage Sale. Basically, a few kind people organised it and advertised far and wide, so that lots of garage sale lovers/bargain hunters would flock to town. The idea was that if you wanted to participate, you paid $5 to the organisers for their efforts and then put all your stuff out for sale, and lots of people turn up and buy it! 

There were about 20 houses participating in the end, which is pretty cool - if you like your garage sales it would make the trip out to our town pretty worthwhile. And there was a morning tea/sausage sizzle thing happening as well [I dream of the day when it isn't a 'sausage sizzle' but is instead a selection of good vegetarian foods on offer..] Anyway, we participated, we had a ton of people turn up to our place and we sold a lot of 'stuff' from the house that we no longer wanted or needed. Win.
My Maxwell & Williams 'Cat and Mouse' mugs didn't sell! Back to the cupboard for you guys.

We ended up making $133 in sales. We're happy with that, since we had no idea what to expect from the whole day. We sold a remote control helicopter [we can live with only having one in the house], a bunch of books [that was a little bit hard for me, but I'm going with it] and our microwave. Yep, we decided that we're going to live microwave free. Since we don't really like what it actually does to food in the heating process. And we gave away a few things too - a stack of folders, kitchen goodies, battery rechargers.

The really interesting thing for me, was meeting all these random people. I like people, I like people watching, and all these different people with different stories were turning up and browsing our wares. A few locals came for a look, one of whom was born in our house, back in the day. Others who remembered our house from a different era, before it went to 'rack and ruin' [apparently, but it's been tidied up again now]. A lady who chatted to us about meditation for ages [trigger = prayer flags] and a young couple who had also been looking at buying our place when we did [slightly awkward!].  

All up it was a great day. There are definitely benefits to living in a small community like this, and days such as this are one of those. We didn't sell everything we wanted to, but now we have a pile of things to advertise in other places to get rid of. The timing was pretty cool too, we're totally in the 'nesting before baby arrives' stage and having a big house clean out was just what we needed. It was even worth the 8.30am start on a Sunday. I suppose we should be getting ready for more early starts pretty soon...

4 comments:

  1. When I was a kid my town organized these kinds of sales as well... I only participated once, when I had the initiative to gather up all my old toys and we brought them to a friend's house that lived on a main road... but I remember it being kinda fun.

    ReplyDelete
  2. They did not sell? But they are so cute!!

    ReplyDelete
  3. I love sales like that, looking forward to tag sale season in these parts come spring and summer :)

    ReplyDelete
  4. What a cool idea! I've never thought of that before, a community garage sale. What a good idea for small towns. I should suggest that to my parents town, they're small and they'd totally be into that. Glad that you guys did well at it.

    ReplyDelete

Thank you for commenting. I read and appreciate every one.