Pre-Yard Sale Thoughts

In all my years, I've never once done the yard sale thing.  I've seen them - my neighborhood had a community yard sale every year for pretty much my entire life - but we never sold anything or bought anything.  It just wasn't something we did.  Nothing against yard sales, but I'd rather go real shopping then having to work to find the good stuff.

So that makes it a bit off for me to be gathering up my belongings to try to sell them this weekend at a friend's community yard sale.  I've been planning to participate for months, yet I never really knew what that meant.  I just know that there's so much stuff and I want all that stuff out of my house.  Also, if I can make money off of selling my stuff I can buy more stuff - mostly books.

This is the whole explanation for why there are currently 5 crates of books and 1 crate of cds littering up my living room, my car and my friend's car.  There are even more books taking up space in my dad's car - but those are his.  I'm just the broker.  In this my first yard sale experience, I've learned a few things.  One of which being the fact that as much fun as it is to think about selling and making money, it's super not fun to decide what to get rid of.  It's painstaking.  One moment, I'm blase and throwing every single book I didn't like in a box.  And the next, I'm silently taking books out of the box because one day I will finally get around to wanting to read "The Help" and maybe I shouldn't really sell it at this time.

Then there's the matter of cost.  How in the heck do you decide what to price books or cd's? I've spent a fortune, and some are still in perfect condition.  But no one wants to spend that much at a yard sale on one book.  But then again, if you make it a steal, you'll need to sell tons to make money.  This is not a fun prospect for a math-hater like me.

Lastly, it's the thing no one in their right mind but me thinks about.  How does one display the items you're planning to sell in a visually pleasing way?  Does one use boxes or tables or does one make a lovely sign announcing what one's selling?  Or does one just drop it all in a cardboard box - since that's what everyone else is doing - and hope for the best?  It's a conundrum.  One which I haven't yet solved.  But seeing that the sale is in T-56 hours and counting, I really should get on that.