Fire Sale at the Big Top

Wanna know what I did for my birthday??? Had a garage sale. I know; it sounds like the epitome of fun. However, North Beach had a town-wide yard sale which was a perfect opportunity to 'down-size' all of our stuff before moving into the (much smaller) funky beach shack.

How does one get all that stuff? For a year we've had the largest sized warehouse that the local place leases. It's criminal. And before that we've had one in various places (Baltimore and Charleston before) for around 3 years. Maybe it's hereditary. Mom had a warehouse in Marathon Florida for over 20 years!! All during a time when we lived 50 miles away. When it was said and done she had to back up a dump truck to the door and empty the whole thing out. Anyway, I digress...

So we had this wicked large sale yesterday. Kudos to our neighbor Mark for letting us take over the garage to set everything up! It made life much more wonderful. Power to prove things worked (plus the absolutely necessary music), nice and shaded, and best of all when it was said and done we just closed the door. Fabulous!

Sadly, we've done a few of these before. Gary and I have differing pricing philosophies. His is to ask the highest price and hope it goes... Nothing really wrong with that. Mine though is to price it to go... Release all emotional attachment to the stuff and let it fly. This has worked in the past. We had an enormous barn sale when we lived in North Carolina. And let me tell you, those people are major yard salers!!! In a two-weekend sale, we made over $5,000!! And still had enough stuff to completely outfit the abused women's shelter.

We did very well this time; sold all the furniture and probably half of the stuff. People that came said we had the best sale in town - good prices and tons of stuff. One woman spent 2 hours and her car was absolutely bulging at the rivets when she pulled out. Several others returned with friends. Despite the good turn out we still have billions of kitchen gizmo's and enough clothes to start our own department store. We made over $600; not bad. It will pay for the movers. Today we'll pack the rest up and take it to the local charity thrift store.

My day wasn't all work. We joined our friends Aric and Gwen and some of their friends in Annapolis last night for sushi. Had a great time and some tasty fish. Drove home through a total deluge, crawled into bed and slept the sleep of the just.