Looking for some yard sale advice

[enchantedpixiedust]

Hi Everyone

I'm working on pricing & sorting everything for the yard sale I have planned for the 28th. I haven't been able to find even a small portion of the hangars I would need to hang everything. If you didn't hang all the clothes what did you do with them? My problem is that I have a bunch of really nice work clothes that I hate to throw in a pile w/ the tshirts, etc.

Also - did you sort your items? Household, holiday, etc?

Any other words of advice would be great as to getting this thing organized and ready. There might only be two of us there so I don't want it to be mass chaos.

 

[DianeV]

I would try to scrounge up more hangers if you could for the nicer clothes. They wont get noticed if they are folded with casual stuff.

We always try to organize household (glasses together, vases, dishes etc) holiday, misc., toys, videos and music, and kids clothes..

Organizing will help alot!

 

[Chim Chiminy]

My advice, don't do it.

Sorry, I am just bitter. We had one last weekend and only made $120. That was with selling strollers, crib and changing table, two bookcases, and other big ticket items.
Next time, I will just donate and take the tax write off.

If you are in an area where people are willing to pay reasonable prices then of course, go ahead.
They weren't here. Literally wanted everything for 10 or 25 cents. Nice designer clothes, everything.


Organize! It makes it easier for the buyers to find what they are looking for.
Do you have signs made up to post? Use bright posterboard for them.
Have someone there to help you. It can help save your sanity.

Good luck!!! Hope you make out better than we did.

 

[mom2alix]

I went to the dry clearners and asked about buying some of the cheap wire hangers they use and the manager gave me as many as I could carry for FREE! Might be worth a try for you.

 

[GoofItUp]

Or, if you know someone who takes clothes to the dry cleaners regularly, ask if they have some you could use. It really is nicer to have clothes hanging if possible. Also, it is important to organize things into like categories. It makes it so much easier if someone comes by shopping for a particular thing. Good luck with your sale! We made $200 a couple of weeks ago at a multi-family garage sale and we didn't really have any big ticket items. We had so much left over that we're doing another one this weekend at a different house on a different side of town.

 

[Tigge50447]

also if you have several small items that are alike I would put them in plastic baggies with labels. I even sold some extra diapers my son grew out of 6 for 50 cents.

I had some curtains and I drew a picture of them with the sizes and put them in a freezer bag with the label, all of them sold. I also put like small baby toys in a freezer bag for $1 rather then 10 cents a piece. Rotate your items after you sell things so it doesn't look bare. I would suggest putting a sign up in front of your house a week in advance saying "Garage sale Saturday the 20th @ 9am " to let people know in advance. All the items in our free basket went as well. Small stuff animals, McDonald toys. If you have any items that require electricity have a power strip or an outlet people can test them or run an extention cord out and plug them in and have them on display.

Our last yard sale I did with my sister and her BF she made $65 he made $150 and I made $100


Good Luck

 

[deelovesdis]

Two years ago I had a yard sale. I had a couple big ticket items, stroller, high chair, but the rest was your typical baby clothes, books, etc. I made $350 for the day.

I put all of the good clothes on hangers, and I had a $1 table, $2 table and $5 table. I definitely put stickers on all items, color coded, so I knew if it was red is was $5, so somebody could not change the price. I put a price sticker on the hanger, on the inside collar of the item and inside of the leg, so if the person did a switch I would have the correct code inside of the item. I also wrote down each item and how much I wanted for it.

I washed or dry cleaned everything , cleaned all books, toys, etc,
I put brightly colored tableclothes on each table and put signs out the day before. I also put a $16 classifed ad in our local paper under "garage sales". I think the extra effort I put into my yard sale really helped.

I plan to have another yard sale in two weeks. Whatever I make will go directly for spending money for my trip Sept 10. 2004. I am not sure if I will put the ad in this year as the rate has gone up to $40. But , I think it really helped bring in some people.

Dee

 

[CarolA]

I did a HUGE yard sale a few weeks ago. (About 8 families and some others) We are raising money for a trip to Europe for the girls.

Here are some things that worked well for us...

Sort by something you can remember. That way if someone says "Do you have any....."? you can point them in the right direction. We had Kitchen, Home Decor, Clothes, Toys, Books, sporting goods etc...

We had a team sort the clothing. Things they thought were good went on hangers everything else on tables by type (mens, kids, womens). For the table items we went with $4 for all you could stuff in a grocery sack!

We had a box of small toys (McDonald's type junk) that we sold for 50 cents a baggie, Kept the kids busy stuffing the baggie!

If you have something you think is worth a price stick to it! For example I had a nice Cannon Camera that I priced at $50. One guy told me he could get it for that at a pawn shop so I should go lower??? I had about 8 people try to talk me down, but I didn't go lower. It sold at the asking price.

We also sold bottled water. I think this would have gone much better if the weather had been HOT, but for purposes of the sale the weather was great.

We did do an add for three days in advance which helped, but we had a good location.

In our case we got the best of both worlds. Everything we dontated to the sale was a tax deduction since the sale funds went directly into the Girl Scout bank account.

We raised $2,000! We will do another one this spring that's for sure!

 

[mikess]

My last yard sale I bought a cheap clothes line and some clothes pins and hung clothes that way. I just put them up where ever I could, between trees, cars, tables' ect. Plus we a stack of small bags and put out a sign that said "Fill A Bag of Clothes for $3". We made a killing. Of course, the jackets and name brand stuff was in a different section.

For some reason people like bags. We got some cheap gallon zip-lock like bags and filled them up with Happy Meal and other cheap toys and sold them for $1-$2 each. People ate them up too.

And don't leave things in boxes. People hate digging. Display everthing if you can.

 

[mom2alix]

I also rented 2 clothes racks from the local rent-all place. I think it was $9 a piece for 4 days. These were nice rolling racks like they use in a store. I had mostly baby clothes so I safety pinned them to wire hangers and just put up a big sign 1 item - $2.50, 2 piece sets $5, 3 piece sets $7. That way I didn't have to worry about tag switchers, etc. and it was easier than putting separate price stickers on everything. Anything I thought I could get more for I held back to eBay once school starts (Gymboree, NWT stuff, etc.) I sold TONS of clothes, so this really worked well for me.

The newspaper ad really seemed to help too and well as lots of signs on the major roads lading into our neighborhood. Having a multi-family sale also seems to help since you have a lot of stuff to draw people out. I made about $350 and my 4 friends who brought stuff probably made about another $100 a piece.

At the end as we packed up, we also did a mini-swap meet amongst ourselves too which was kind of fun. Stuff I wanted rid of looks really cute at my friend's house! The best part was that I ended up with a small box of books to donate to the library and 1 small box of odds and ends for goodwill. I can't believe how much we cleared out! The money was nice, but a clean basement and garage is PRICELESS!

 

[LynnTH]

My Mom and I always have a yearly sale together along with some other relatives and each year we make about $1500 total. We do organize everything according to what it is and we also advertise in two different papers. (everyone splits the cost on this so it only comes out to about $5 per person)

I think the more families you can get together to have the sale with the better. I know I won't even stop at a sale I am driving by unless I can see that they have a lot of stuff.

Another thing that has helped with the clothes ( I have a lot of kids clothes) is that I found on the internet a couple of years ago some of those size tags that stores use on their rounders. I have a couple of sets of these and have one rack with girls clothes and one with boys clothes. Then I can separate them by sizes. I have from 0-3 months up to 5 Toddler and then adult sizes. This seems to help with people looking for clothes - they can go right to where they need to be without having to dig through everything.

Signs are also very important. You have to have a lot of signs that lead people to your house. Many are just driving around and see a sign and follow it ( I know I do). But make sure you make them big enough with just enough info to get them to your house. I hate when I see a sign that has so much writing on there and it is so small that I cannot see it as I am driving by. I am certainly not going to get out of my car to go see. So, make ths signs easy and big and bright.

Just my two cents as a veteran garage sale holder. Thanks.

 

[crazee4mickey]

I had a yard sale end of July to save for our upcoming trip and did amazingly well(over $1000 CDN!!!)
Anyways I did sort items so they were easier to find-a box of books for $0.25; household items on a seperate table; a table of kids small toys like McDonald's, dinky cars $0.25 for one or $1.00 for 5; had lots of clothes and didn't hang any up but they were organized, spread out and folded neatly such as woman's, men, teenagers, girls, boys--prices were no more than $2.00 an item--if there are a lot of t-shirts(not the really nice ones though, just ones good for play clothes) we put them in a box marked boys or girls and sold for $0.25. Had one item a sewing machine that was sold for $60.00 other than that it was all low priced.
We had compliments on how easy it was to find things--it took a couple of evenings to organize but was well worth it in the end! Don't get really worried about organizing---put things together in general groups--holiday items went with household-books went with videos---all glassware together!
Prices were kept low and its amazing how much more people buy if something is under $2.00!!
We also made signs on neon poster board advertising "AMAZING YARD SALE" and "UNBELIEVABLE", "DON"T MISS" then put to follow the balloons(which might be hard depending on where you live--anyways eventually they end up at the home with the huge bunch of balloons at the end of the drive---it just makes it look like you've got everything "together"!
We hung up small, bright, colorful posters in local grocery store about one week before and put a small ad in the paper--expense to us was less than $15.00, hard work but as you can see by amount sold it was worth it!!
Have fun and hope your yard sale is a success!

 

[pediatric-rnp]

We have done 8 yard sales, and made anywhere between $250.00 up to $1,000! The $1,000 sale was our first - we had tons of stuff we wanted to get rid of, having just moved.

I can only emphasize what others have said - it pays off to clean items and have them organized. Small items in baggies really do go well - people think they are getting a bargain when there are several items together. We choose one neon color for all our advertisement posters - this way people can follow the hot pink or whatever color you choose all the way - we also say that in our newspaper advertisement. It does pay off to place it in the paper - all of our elderly customers come by with the hometown paper folded and highlighted. (They also have been known to split up with friends and use walkie talkies - they compare what we have to what their friends are finding at other sales!) Make sure you itemize the bigger and more desirable items - doing this has drawn many to our yard sales when they are looking for a particular item.

I never negotiate prices for the first 2 hrs of the sale. Our town allows sales to be advertised to start at 8 AM, but I always say "early birds welcome". And believe me -they come as early as 6:30, while we are setting up! You want them to be at your yard sale before anyone elses. After 2 hrs, I will negotiate prices, as the bulk of the crowd is lessening. At noon, we tell everyone the price is 50% off marked price - things get scooped up by the armload -everyone loves a bargain. The main goal is not not have to lug the stuff back in the house!!!

Watch your items carefully - theft is common. We had a family drive up in a new Volvo wagon, wearing designer clothing, and while Mom was looking around, Dad placed two summer hats we were selling on his twin sons heads, placed 2 of our toys in their hands, and headed back to the car! His wife didn't see him do this, so wouldn't have known to pay for the items - my DH marched up to him and pointed out where the cashier (me!) was!! DH said he would never had done this if the family looked destitute, however given their obvious circumstances he was furious!

Good luck - with good planning it can be a money-maker!