Our First Yard Sale!

Tomorrow morning, we are having our first yard sale!  I can hardly believe that we have accumulated enough stuff as a family to have a yard sale, but, as I'm sure you know, you can get a lot of stuff in 4-1/2 years! 

Since this is my first time doing anything like this, I'd love to hear any tips that anyone has to share!  Here are the things that I've already done to prepare, mostly using ideas I've gleaned from attending yard sales, as well as from a few helpful blog posts like this one.

- I invited friends to join us - I know that when I see a yard sale, the more stuff there is, the more likely I am to stop.  Since we are still a relatively young family, I didn't think that we had enough stuff to have a really desirable yard sale, so I invited some friends to come and sell their stuff with us.  We gain by having a better-stocked sale, and they gain by not having to organize their own yard sale.

- I priced grouped stuff in boxes and priced them by category - Instead of putting price tags on each item, I divided my items into categories of $.50, $1, $2.50, and $5 (with a couple large items more expensive).  Then I just labeled a bunch of cardboard boxes with the prices and divided the items among the boxes.  The advantage to this system will defintely be in setting up, as all we'll have to do is to carry all the boxes outside.  It remains to be seen if the pricing structure turns out well.

- I advertised - on Craigslist and a local classifieds Yahoo group.  I mentioned some of the more desirable items that we have in my ad.

- I made lots of signs - My pet yard sale peeve is signs with so much information on them that you can't read them!  Therefore, most of my signs just say "YARD SALE" with an arrow!  That's usually all the info you need!  I didn't want to invest money in the signs, so I cut up a cardboard box and wrote on it with an orange permanant maker.  We're going to duct tape our gardening stakes to the back of them. 

Like I said, this is all a learning process for us, so I'm sure we'll do better next time around.  I'm just hoping that tomorrow we have nice weather, clean out our house, and make a little extra money!

Check back next week to see how it went!

See lots of frugal ideas at Frugal Fridays!