The Mother of All Garage Sales

Well we have been busy busy busy over here.  We decided (and by we I mean Scott) that Easter weekend would be a great time to have our much needed and long overdue garage sale.  Scott was off all week on Spring Break and we kept our fingers crossed that the weather would cooperate.

We have been lucky enough to be able to store the majority of our unused stuff (and by stuff I mean hoards and hoards of little girl clothes, big toys, little toys, carseats, breast pumps, strollers, etc.) over at my parent's polebarn.  Which it was so nice to be able to store all that stuff over there - but when it is not staring you in the face...it sure does seem to accumulate and multiply quite quickly. 

So after multiple trips bringing all that stuff back to our house and then organizing and folding 15 totes worth of clothes (and re-folding after the girls inspected everything) we had 2 garage bays chock full.  Seriously it looked like a pepto bismal bottle exploded on the one side and the other side housed all the furniture, knick knacks and other misc items that needed to leave my house.

We had hoped that we would get some good traffic and had already determined that everything that didn't sell would either go to charity or would be headed for Goodwill.  We had no idea the amount of people we would get and were completely unprepared for the 100s of people that showed up.  Nolee helped with sales and would say hi and bye to everyone that walked in.  Lilly was in charge of the money...in the sense that she would take quarters from the till and my purses that were for sale and have her own little garage sale business going on the side.  Although I do believe some people may have made out pretty good on some of those purses that were marked at 25 cents that had 1.25 worth of quarters stuffed inside :).  At one point in time the girls were outside greeting people when I heard Lilly say "Good morning, thank you for shopping at Meijer!"  Everyone within earshot got a good laugh out of that.

It was crazy - but a good crazy and we sold everything except 4 small boxes that we are donating to charity.  One of the best parts is that everything is gone and man does that feel good.  The other best part...we made over $800!!  It was unbelievable and a total surprise when we counted up our earnings.  The girls got all the change to put into their piggy banks (which was around $15-$20 each).  Scott and I had some ideas of what to use the money on...and of course the cheap side of us just wanted to put it in savings, but we never do anything fun with extra money like this so we headed to town on Saturday, just to price things out mind you.  We went prepared with a list and wrote down the best prices on items we were looking at and where they were and we were then going to go home and determine which would be the best buy and hopefully be something fun for the whole family.

The plan was going well until we hit the last stop...Doug's Small Engine.  They sell new & used lawn mowers.  Right now we have a push mower and also borrow my brothers really REALLY old lawn mower when we need it (which I can't drive because it doesn't have brakes...and our yard has hills), but hey we don't argue with free around here.  Scott has been dreaming of a zero turn lawn mower for years.  I on the other hand would love just a normal riding lawn mower - so the girls can ride with us...and they are less than 1/2 the price of a zero turn! 

Did you know brand new lawn mowers lose a ton of value as soon as you drive them off the lot (just like new cars)...well I didn't either until I asked.  So with that little tidbit of information in our heads we asked to see their used lawn mowers and that's when the guy showed us this.

Some guy had just traded it in for a push mower.  Apparently he has a very small yard in town and realized this was too big for his needs.  It looks like he waxed the thing down every time he mowed and it only has around 50-70 hrs on it (lawn mower mileage is done in hours - learned something else new too!).  It included the bagger in back and the price tag was $700 - which is less than 1/2 the cost of the new ones we had been looking at and they didn't include a bagger! 

We quickly had my brother call his friend who worked there (whom I waved to as he was talking on the phone as I literally sat on the my lawn mower so no one else would come look at it.  After getting the go ahead from my brother - and his word that he would actually do work on it if we needed him to (saying he is NOT a John Deere man is putting it mildly) in exchange for free use, we made our purchase before anyone else could snag it up.

Scott has been on cloud nine since and I'm pretty sure my lawn will be mowed tonight when they deliver it.  And the cheap side of me was just tickled when a co-worker of mine informed me that he just bought basically the same machine for $3000!!!  Okay here's more pics of Scott's new toy :).  I have to say I grew up on a farm where green was a forbidden color, but I have to admit this shiny little guy has put a pretty big grin on my face as well :).