making money on the side

This weekend we hosted a multi family yard sale in our front yard.

When I agreed to host the sale I had NO idea how much work a yard sale is. The only yard sale I've ever participated in was hosted by my amazingly hard working mother who makes everything look effortless. Preparing for a sale is ROUGH. You have to go through all your crap and figure out what you think someone might actually buy from you. If your storage areas are like mine you stuff is crammed in, totally unorganized and covered in an embarrassingly deep layer of dust.

After deciding what to keep, sell and throw away you then have to decide how much to sell it for, take good pictures of it, post it every day on craigslist, make posters and run around your neighborhood like a crazy person hanging the posters.

Luckily, the other people selling at our sale were awesome and did a large majority of the work.

The day of the sale I had to go in to work REALLY early so I wasn't there to help set up.

When I pulled into my neighborhood I saw a mammoth amount of stuff and about 30 people milling around my yard perusing my stuff. It was awesome.

All day I barely had to do a thing! We devised a sticker method to keep track of who was making what money so we could just put it all on one pot all day long. At the end we separated it all out and it worked like a charm.

The real MVP of the day had to be the ear doctor. I never imagined how important it would be to have a fluent Spanish speaker wheeling and dealing at the sale. I'm sure we made more money simply because he was able to really negotiate with the 50% of our buyers who were much more comfortable speaking in Spanish.

All told, the sale generated about $700! And we took about $200 of that for ourselves. Not a fortune, but enough to say that it wasn't a waste of our time.


Plus now my kitchen cabinet that used to hold all my baking tools doesn't explode every time I try to pull out a pie pan.


Mission accomplished.