It’s almost time for us to go back to Puerto Rico where our Beautiful DIY Home is waiting for us, but as you may know, it is not a big house it is an 800sqft house to be exact. So to make our stuff fit in the house we needed to make many hard decisions at the time of moving and one of them was what to bring with us and what not, so with the items that we didn’t move, we decided to make a garage sale to try to earn a little bit of money out of them, and let us tell you it really worked. So we want to share with you a few tips and tricks we implemented to make this garage sale a complete success and at the end of this post, we share with you some key and interesting moments of our sale in a fun video.
1. Entertainment
Shopping can be really intimidating and/or boring especially when you are buying at someone’s house so having some music in the area will make people more comfortable in our case we use a Google Home with Pandora music but you can have an Amazon Alexa or even your phone instead. You can check at Walmart, Amazon, Best Buy, or even at The Home Depot where you can find a variety of different devices.
2. Signs And Labels
We suggest you buy bright color boards and labels we bought a pack of boards at Walmart and they were already cut into shapes and painted in bright neon colors also we bought some bright colors labels to write the price on and stick them to the items. These labels are perfect so you can identify the price of the items by their color.
3. Take Notes
Many people come to your garage sale and if you want to have control of your selling items it is a good idea to have a small notebook or piece of paper where you can keep track of each item your “customers” pick, you can either do a tally or write the price of each item with a description of the customer, for example, their shirt color, hat, glasses, etc.
4. Cash and other payment methods
A must-have in your sale is an alternative payment option, many people today dates don’t carry enough cash or don’t carry cash at all so we suggest you have a different payment method like Venmo, Paypal, or even Crypto Currencies, for them, and also always have enough money for giving change, especially lots of quarters, ones, and fives, because there’s always someone buying a one-dollar item with a $20 or $50 dollar bill.
5. Adequate price
Most likely people who are looking for garage sales are the ones looking for a bargain or really cheap prices taking advantage of people that are going to move or people that just want to make some space in their home so sometimes even with your low prices there will be people who will ask for a discount, take that in mind so you don’t get surprised.
6. Bigger or Expensive Items
Most likely you’ll have a big or expensive item to sell we recommend doing it online in one of the most trending marketplaces in your area like the Facebook Marketplace or Offerup this will be a nice place to do it so because you can preserve the value of your item while maybe selling some other items at the time of the pickup, this is what we did and it really worked, but we don’t think a garage sale will be the perfect place to sell them, remember many people that go to a garage sale are looking for cheap or inexpensive items and if you don’t want to lose a lot of money this is not the right place for it, Instead set your garage for a garage sale and open it every time someone is picking a big or expensive item and you will see that you’ll get better money for your items.
7. Additional Earnings
There’s always a way of making extra cash, you just need to put your mind to flow and be creative, in our case we have kids and they have been asking us to make a lemonade stand for a while so that they can earn some money to buy new toys, so we decided to give them the opportunity of opening their first lemonade stand (it was actually Limeade instead) so as you may know Florida weather is kind of hot almost any time of the year and a lemonade stand was the perfect addition to our garage sale, but in your case, you could do a coffee or hot cocoa bar instead, it depends on where you live.
