Garage Sale!

(I am going to skim the surface of what might be an emotionally-charged topic.  Pull up your big girl panties and prepare yourself.)

Ready?  Good.

First off, let me say that throwing one of these solo along with being the only caregiver home for three kids?  Not very good planning on my part.  Ok, with that out of the way...

Such a helper.  So.  Much.  Help.

Something I've learned about garage sales over the past few days is that it is way more fun to find and shop at them than it is to try and advertise and host one.  Seriously.  My six signs around town mustn't have done their job.  I don't get it...we had gorgeous weather (see: everyone is probably on the lake), slight breeze (see: just enough to blow all your stuff off the tables and signs into the street), and it's the last weekend before school starting (see: everyone is probably having quality time with their kids).  Oh, and it's the second weekend of the Great Minnesota Get Together as well as the Rennaisance Festival.  Clever Sam, so clever!

In addition to trying to sell live and in person, I belong to a handful of "Facebook garage sale" groups.  I find it fascinating the varying degree to which people value their old belongings.

I'd take $5 but the clothes are sold separately...

Personally, if there is anything I'm willing to part with, I am probably so excited to get it OUT of my house that I won't think twice about marking it at a "steal" price and rejoice when I see it carried away. Naturally the special clothes for the girls' firsts are hoarded in the basement (first Christmas, etc.) I'm sure the day will come when I am willing to part with them, and I bet when that time comes I'll hold on as tight as I can via overpricing my thrice worn little girl clothes (or four times....).

But the first outfits will live in my basement forever.

I have two totes worth of junk that if anyone is willing to dig through they get the stuff free.  I accidentally (but I can hardly be blamed, he never priced them) sold off the old old Star Wars toys and boxes of comics at probably much less than they were worth.

And of course everyone is well within their right to assign whatever value they please to their junk possessions.  What baffles me is the ones who get downright offended when you won't pay the asked price.  I'm not talking about getting "nickled and dimed".  I'm not talking about getting low-balled.  I'm talking about getting a "thanks but no thanks" response and reacting in a childish, stomp-your-feet kind of way and calling attention to how cheap or what a "scam artist" you believe someone is.

I, personally, don't buy baby and/or kids clothes with the intent of someday cashing in on what I invested in them.  I understand that there are emotions tied to those scraps of cloth that were once coated in spit-up and mashed pears, but to put a price on those emotions seems...silly?  Especially when your potential buyers aren't purchasing sentimental memories of your kids' firsts.  They're out there looking to buy what will become their own "I remember when he wore this..."  or "That day was so perfect...".

You can't put a price on this kind of awesome.

Or it could be just that I was once a poor, single mom and impulsive and impatient about trying to sell things.  There's always that too.

In the end I brought most of my stuff in big black garbage bags to a goodwill and posted the others on a "families in need" group in the hopes I can help another family out there with babies.  My stuff is just stuff.  And the less of it I have, the less weighed down I'll be when it comes time to book out because zombies are tearing down my back door.