Will you take a quarter for this?

Garage sales are a lot of work. Cleaning the garage to make it presentable for a sale, merchandising your junk so it appeals to your customers, creating fabulous signs enticing people your way, and putting up with the annoying cheapies who want your $48 Gap shirt for .50 cents when it's marked $1.

Halfway through my first sale day I was wishing I would have taken a few photos of my customers. The lady who could barely contain her excitement over my Pottery Barn items, the couple who talked me down to $7.50 for my mom's huge framed and matted horse print we had above our couch growing up, and then the lady with her dog. Wow. It was at this point I realized my camera would have been necessary to give you a full idea of what I was seeing. I'm fairly certain she was on drugs, her skinny bony body gave that away. She was outfitted in elastic waisted jean shorts three sizes too big, cinched even more with a belt. No shirt, just a sports bra that appeared to be at least 10 years old. It had a zipper in the front. Question mark. She definitely needed to go visit Brenda at Victoria's Secret, for some sort of push up bra. Her hair looked like she had just shoved her finger into a light socket and it was clear she LOVED purple eye shadow and thought it looked REALLY good on her. But it wasn't her appearance that threw me off, it was the way she was talking to her dog as if it was an actual human being. And she wasn't afraid to shout from the top of her lungs at her dog, making herself known to my entire neighborhood. I think Carma from across the street was peeking through her window to see the excitement. "CHI CHI, CHI CHI, GET OVER HERE" is pretty much what was heard over and over. Here is this crazy looking lady with a tiny little dog, so of course Ally is staring in astonishment at this woman. She leaps out of her whale pool to greet our customer and ask five times if she can pet her dog. It takes the full five questions before the woman realizes Ally is talking to her. She tells Ally "yes" so for the remainder of her visit Ally chases her dog under tables, in and out of the garage, and all over our yard. The woman rummages through my table of $1 clothes and tries on multiple things. Hey maybe that's why she didn't wear a shirt...easier access? She finds three shirts she likes, offers me $2, calls for her dog 20 more times and heads back to her car. Thank you for shopping at my sale, I think to myself.

Then there were the men looking for tools, like at all garage sales. The people who ask me 40 times if Hudson's car is for sale, Ally's bike, the chairs we are sitting in, and anything else they see hung or shelved in the garage. One man offered me $2 for three big boxes of granite tile and looked completely suprised when I said no. Seriously? I know it's a garage sale and all, but we paid like $6 a tile for those! He wanted ALL of the tiles for $2. There were even people who wanted to use my restroom....Um NO! (But of course I said yes and then proceeded to disinfect my entire downstairs bathroom )

I think even Dan had a good time because he "worked from home" all day Friday and then cancelled his lessons Saturday morning. Come on Dan, don't lie, you know you loved it. He was out in the garage calling people he knew announcing the sale of Ally's True Religion jeans, and making sure I was pricing things accordingly. And of course if you know Dan, he was collecting his things off my tables because he wanted to keep them (my little packrat).

All in all, our sale weekend was a success. I made a record total of $1600! And I couldn't have enjoyed it to the fullest without all the fun people who stopped by.

Especially those pictured below.