Our First and Last Garage Sale in Princeton

I realize I have been missing for the last couple days.  I have been working.  Yes, working at my own garage sale.  I have never enjoyed having garage sales.  My mother used to have gigantic ones.  She would merchandise by putting tables with lamps and knick knacks on them.  She would set up dining tables with place settings.  She would stay up into the wee hours refinishing furniture to sell.  My dad would rewire lamps.  All I can say is UGG!  That's not for me.  I don't mind the actual sales days, but preparing is a ton of work.  It's hard to decided what to sell and then decide what to charge.  If you ask too much, then it doesn't sell.  If you sell it right away, then you think you could have gotten more.  It's a guessing game. Then there is the problem of putting up signs.  My husband made fantastic sandwich board signs with our address painted in big letters, but we weren't sure where to put them.  We didn't know if it was legal to put them in certain places.  The police never came so I guess we chose wisely.  Here is our sale just before we opened up.

7:00 AM, first day of the garage sale.

Even though the preparation was awful, the sale was fun.  The weather was perfect with nice temperatures, a light breeze and no rain.  As you know, we live kind of hidden away in the woods.  Therefore, the number of people who found us was down quite a bit.  Almost everyone who came bought something, and we sold the big stuff we wanted to sell.  We sold our built in oven and cook top that we took out during our kitchen remodel.  That was a big relief.   Our daughter Heather came over this morning with our grandson Dylan.  He had some of his stuff in the sale and his mother told him if he wanted the money, he had to work for it.  He had to make change without the benefit of a cash register.  He did a great job.  Some of the clerks we encounter in stores couldn't make change without the machine.  Some of them have trouble with a cash register.

One of the highlights of the sale was when a man showed up and told us that he had built our house 35 years ago.  He told us things we didn't know about the house.  He told us that he had happy times in the house but after he sold it, his wife got breast cancer at age 37 and struggled for thirteen years before she died.  He told us that the pond we have has a name on the county plat.  It is called Lake Lourrina, named after his wife.  I will have to go to the courthouse to see exactly how to spell it.  He brought a photo taken from the deck back then and gave it to us.  Things haven't changed that much, just that the trees have gotten larger.  Now I can say we have lake property instead of swamp property.

Photo taken with a 35mm camera over 30 years ago.

 

Photo taken today, July 13, 2013.

All in all, I am glad we had the sale.  I am glad we got rid of several things that we didn't need, but I doubt if I will ever do it again in my life.