My grandmother, who is in her 80s, recently decided it was time to move to a retirement home. This meant going from a 3 bedroom house to a 2 bedroom apartment, with about a third of the space. She had been living in her house for 34 years and had accumulated a whole lot of stuff. It was decided it would be sold at a garage sale.
Craig’s List: A Great Place To List Your Best
Most of grandma’s stuff was mid-century modern so we knew that putting a $5.00 price tag on it wasn’t going to cut it. I decided to use the help of craigslist.com and actually advertise the larger items by themselves on the day of the garage sale. The thought was, we didn’t want people coming over to grandma’s house to look at furniture when she was home alone, but if we were having a garage sale, we would all be there with her anyway. It worked like a charm. I put an advertisement in the garage sale section just to let people know about the sale in general and then I specifically listed out certain items and pictures in the furniture section. It’s kind of a weird phenomenon. If someone just happens by a garage sale and sees an item with a certain price tag on it, they automatically think the price is too high, try and talk you down and may eventually just walk away. However, if they see the same item on craigslist.com, it seems like the deal of a century and they want to scoop it up before someone else does. Use that to your advantage.
Know Your Inventory
Another helpful piece of information we discovered was to be aware of what our items are made of. Grandma had a set of silver candlesticks from the 80s that weren’t real tall or visually striking. They said sterling silver on the bottom, but it was “sterling silver weighted.” Grandma didn’t think they would be worth anything because, well, how on earth do you weigh something that’s weighted? She was content to put a $1.00 price tag on them and be done with it. I decided to take it a step further and ran them over to the local gold and silver buyer, in this case a coin shop. It turns out sterling silver weighted means that it is literally a lead base with sterling silver foil over it. It’s a way to have a sterling silver outer appearance, but be heavy enough to stand up with a candle in it and not fall over. The people at the coin shop had seen weighted pieces before so they were quick to give us an educated guess on the actual weight of sterling silver foil. We left the shop with $42.50. I’d say that’s a little better than the $2.00 grandma wanted for them and the $.50 we probably would have been talked down to.
Do Your Research
Also, don’t be afraid to do a little research on items you think may have more value. Look it up on ebay and see what people are asking for it. That doesn’t mean you will get that much, after all people can ask for whatever they want on ebay, it doesn’t mean they’ll get it, but it at least gives you an idea. You will have knowledgeable people shopping your sale and they will try and get valuable items from you for nothing. We had two men who arrived before the scheduled time of the sale and once we said “open” they knew exactly what they wanted. We thought they must have a storefront that they were going to go sell the items in. Good for them, everyone needs to make a living, but just be aware of what you have before you decide to put a $1.00 sticker on it.
Trade In The Old Stuff For New
All in all, it was a good day. Grandma received enough money to buy herself a new flat screen TV for the apartment and have a little extra spending money. It can be rough to have all your worldly possessions out in the driveway for all the world to see and haggle over, but if you do some research and make a little extra cash, you’ll feel a bit better about the outcome. Happy garage-saling!
