Peace of Mind Organizing

Talk about your cash in the attic

27 May 2007

When I work with chronically disorganized clients they sometimes want to have a garage sale to get rid of some of their excess stuff and minimize the financial impact of buying things they ended up not wanting.

When I can, I try to dissuade them from having a garage sale because of the effort involved for a relatively modest monetary gain. I worry that because the task of organizing, pricing, and conducting a garage sale can be so big, overwhelm will kick in and the sale will never happen. Which means the stuff might never leave.

But there are exceptions. I worked with a client who was moving and as we decluttered her basement, we set aside items for a yard sale. This client was motivated and agreed that the items that didn’t sell after their post-move yard sale would be donated to their church’s rummage sale. She reported back that they made a tidy sum and while it was a lot of work, they found it worthwhile.

Then there’s the sale my friends had last weekend. I actually cajoled them into doing it. They collect antiques and had a lot of furniture that didn’t have a place in their spacious 1894 home. The furniture, though beautiful and valuable, was cluttering up their home. They thought they might sell it back to the auction house from which they bought it, but knew there’d be no guarantees how much they’d get for it—plus they’d have to pay a commission to the auction house.

“Let’s have a sale!” I said. “It’ll be fun!” The sad truth is that organizing a high-end garage sale is my idea of fun. The guys were game. They decided which pieces they wanted to sell, we went through the receipts for those pieces and priced them (antique-sale, not garage-sale, prices). I made attractive tags for the furniture, which I attached with ribbon. We also sold some more traditional garage-sale items, like clothings and videotapes, at garage-sale prices.

Here’s a photo of the entrance to the sale. The fact that my friends live in a neighborhood of turn-of-the-century mansions might have helped allay any sticker shock—there were pieces in the sale priced higher than $1500.

The sign welcoming shoppers to the antique/garage sale

Before the sale began my friends and each I put in a sealed prediction of how much the sale would bring in. The winner won $50. Suffice it to say that my prediction of $6,250 was the winner! And I underestimated by $1,000.

This was a case where having the sale was worth the effort. We were lucky—the weather was gorgeous. We had marketed the sale as an antique/garage sale, with an emphasis on “antique” and placed an ad in the newspaper, on the email lists for my friends’ neighborhood and mine (I’m in the less-tony neighborhood a block away) and on Craiglist. We put up signs at the entrances to the neighborhood. The result was a steady, but not overwhelming, stream of people.

I still maintain that a garage sale isn’t usually worth the effort. But if you have a special collection of items that you can sell at a price they’re actually worth, it just might be worth your time.

Tagged with: antiques, garage sale, yard sale

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