Finished.... well not quite

It was another successful day for our yard sale. No total for you yet, though. You'll just have to keep biting those nails. We have a lot of items left over so we have decided to have another sale next weekend in another neighbourhood for different traffic. In the meanwhile while you are waiting for the total I am sure Julie will be posting pictures soon at her blog since she is a better blogger than I an actually remembered to take some photos! (You're on top of things Julie!!)

You'll have to try to imagine me in my present state, hair disheveled, sweaty, looking ragged and in a walking zombie like state so if this post makes no sense at all please excuse me.

Heather wanted to know some details about how we ran things so I thought I'd just post it here in case others wanted some pointers.

Our sale consisted mostly of donated items. We traveled to pick up all the donations. We really didn't turn down anything.

First order of business: Clothes. Here's how we did it. We had so many bags of clothes that we couldn't believe it. If I had to guess I would say we had close to twenty five.... that's 25 large outdoor type black trash bags full of clothing (I could be low on that estimation but I didn't want to be dramatic about it ;) In light of our over abundance we came up with the idea to do the $5 fill a bag. Julie bought some plastic waste paper basket liners and we used those as our official bags. If you wanted to you could up the price of the bags for baby clothes simply because you can pack a bunch more in there but we had so much of everything we felt $5 was good. Even with the awesome deals we still had selfish people who couldn't handle the rule that anything hanging over the top would have to go into another bag. You'd think people would be generous being it was going to a good cause but some people are just THAT CHEAP!

Second: People told us that Fridays were better than Saturdays and THEY WERE RIGHT! Our best sales were Friday and NOT Saturday. Shocking but oh so true. We started at 6am and had tons of traffic from people on their way to work who would stop back by on their lunch, etc. More drivers saw our signage on Fri so maybe even some folks came back on Saturday after they saw the sign driving to work on Friday. We made large signs with paper printed in LARGE fonts. Then we used spray adhesive to glue the papers to stiff poster board. I honestly believe that the neat clean signs drew more people than a hand written sign would have. Also, the signs were the MOST effective tool for getting shoppers. We emailed the entire planet and sent out adds in local newspapers, listed on Craigslist, printed up wallet size papers to hand out and I would estimate that the return on that was 10% of the shoppers we had. That's pretty low. So good signage is important (that and a few key shopper who got on their cell phones to tell Friends and family,
"Oh my gosh I am at the hugest Yard sale ever. You've got to get down here!.") Our signs said "HUGE yard sale Fri/Sat 6a-1p" and we printed up separate arrows to affix to the signs after they were hung directing traffic to our place. That got 'em here with no need to include our address. Our city only allows you to post 6 signs and with 6 well placed signs we were able to draw a large crowd.

That's all I can think of. Any more questions leave a comment and I will try to address them for you.