Sale of the Season

Here's the thing about free time.....it isn't really free.  It always comes at a cost, and lately, I can't seem to pay the price.  By the time the dust settles around here it is the wee hours, and I am too pooped to post.  A certain member of this family decided to launch an all out attack on the garage and sell all its contents for six dollars worth of quarters about the same time another member of this family decided to stop sleeping through the night and grow more teeth.  It's been an interesting combo.

When last I wrote, there were visions of a garage sale dancing in my head.  I ate a BIG old piece of humble pie before I mustered the courage to post these "before" photos of the garage.  Seriously, I looked like a candidate for that Clean House show on TLC.  The one where Nicey Nash would come over and declare all my garage foolishness "one hot mess".

I had two days to prepare for the sale, two boy helpers, too much junk to even imagine, and two inches of rain in the forecast.  I set to work with ferocious tenacity.  Basically, if I didn't plan to use it in the next 72 hours, I put it in a trash bag or set it in the garage sale stack.   It wasn't long before I had an Everest of sellables, like old sporting equipment, coolers, a space heater, a rusty trailer hitch, and an unopened package of shims.  What's a girl to ask for good as new shims, anyway??

By the end of day one, I accumulated a wealth of treasures for the sale, a serious load for the dump, and a curious fascination over the fact that savers usually marry throwers.  I would rather throw thirty things away, even if there is a chance I will one day need to go out and re-buy two of those items.  My husband would save every scrap (or shim!) to ever come his way.  Most couples I know are opposites in this way.  

By day two the "fun" of Project Messy Garage had definitely lost its shine.  Who am I kidding....the boys were pretty disillusioned by 10 a.m. on day one.  But, I required them to be there anyway, to sweep away the dead bugs I was scared of, and to support my theory that garage sale misery loves bad attitude company.  Eventually they resorted to playing with the Lincoln Logs I set aside to give away.  Looking back now, I think their elaborate tower is rather charming, but I distinctly remember being annoyed and inconvenienced by it on day two.

My little foreman ran a tight ship and sprinkled snack foods on my floor.

Buzzard came home that night and made good on his promise to help me clean out the master bedroom closet.

By "helping to clean out" I mean pulling down an old memory box and reading his autobiography penned in the fourth grade.  Also, modeling this little gem for me.

  He coached Hannah's soccer team when she was about knee high to a grasshopper, and for some odd reason, the shiny pink shirt didn't seem to deter him.  This shirt screams "I love my kid!" and looking back, I'm pretty sure it was some kind of parenting test.

The big day finally arrived, and between Marci, myself, and our mothers, we were able to offer up quite the collection of cast offs to our community. 
We had glitzty advertising...

....appealing marketing.....

capable bean counters....

and ample security.  Here's Security now, securing last night's game scores.

Garage sales are like child birth.  Enough time passes between the labor of each one, and you tend to forget the amount of pain involved. If I'm not mistaking, I will have completely forgotten how utterly exhausted I am right now by this time next year, when Marci and I will again join forces to swap clutter for cash.