Yard Sale Weekend

The first weekend of April is General Conference weekend for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. It's a great opportunity to listen to the voice of our prophet, President Thomas S. Monson, the apostles who serve with him, and many other church leaders. We are fortunate to be able to watch the conference broadcast (there are three two-hour sessions on Saturday and two sessions on Sunday) from our home, thanks to the magic of streaming television.

However, over the last few years, there's been a small conflict with our Conference-watching schedule. The first weekend in April is also the date of Rancho Sahuarita's semi-annual Community Yard Sale! It's a time for the entire community to pull their used, well-loved, no-longer-needed things out of storage and put them up for sale in their front yards. Dozens of houses participate in each Community Yard Sale; it can be a terrific opportunity to get great deals on clothes, toys, appliances, furniture, and more.

As you can imagine, this weekend is a time when my inner bargain-hunter is at war with my spiritual self. Most of the time, I manage to balance both the events out okay; the yard sale starts early in the morning, so I get up at the crack of dawn, try to snag some early deals, then head home in time for the morning session of Conference (which doesn't start until 9 am). On this particular weekend, though, the conflict was a little more overt...

...because WE had decided to participate in the Yard Sale ourselves! We had a lot of stuff sitting up in our closets, most of it baby-related. The old crib, the Exersaucer, the infant swing, car seats, bathtub, carrier, blankets, and clothes...lots and lots and lots of little-girl clothes. Since we have recently decided that our baby-making days are done, we decided to take the next logical step and divest ourselves of all our baby stuff.

In the weeks leading up to the yard sale, I'd taken the clothes (boxes and boxes of them!) up to Tucson in an attempt to trade them into Twice As Nice, our favorite secondhand clothing store. They didn't buy many of the clothes (I'm sure it had something to do with them being passed down through three or more owners!), but I still managed to accumulate a little store credit. All that remained was to see how many of them I could sell on a warm Saturday morning.

We did our best to advertise for the yard sale in advance (I posted about it on a few local Facebook pages, told my friends firsthand, and even posted the lovely sign you see above). Since we live on a street that dead-ends, I worried people would pass us by, since it would be difficult to navigate. Fortunately, a couple of other houses on our street were also participating in the yard sale, so a lot of visitors thought it would be worth the effort.

An interesting aspect of the Community Yard Sale is that it attracts a lot of visitors from south of the border. Since we only live about 50 miles from Mexico, a lot of enterprising people from that country like to bring their trucks up to Rancho Sahuarita, buy up all the (semi-) valuables they can, then resell them in Mexico for a tidy profit. On the day of the yard sale, it's normal to see truck after truck, piled high with all manner of second-hand items, slowly chugging down street after street, looking for the next "big deal," so they can add that much more to their already overloaded vehicles.

I've heard tales from other yard-sale veterans...tales of Mexican families who drive up to a participating home, ask, "How much for all your stuff?", then strike a quick deal and zip off with the goods before anyone else can get them. I'd also heard it was common for Mexican buyers to bulk-purchase all the clothes offered by a family, and I wondered if something like that would happen to my huge pile of girl clothes.

Short answer: no. However, we did end up selling a good chunk of all the clothes we offered. Nathan and I got up very early Saturday morning (like 4:30 am early--some of the yard-sale enthusiasts get out just before dawn, and we didn't want to miss anybody!). We just managed to get everything set up by the time the first customers started arriving, right around 6:30 am. We had a steady stream of people for the first hour and a half or so...then the crowds slowed down to a trickle, albeit a consistent one. Most of the large toys and baby accessories sold fast; the clothes were just about all that remained by mid-morning.

I never had one customer offer to buy the whole set of clothes from me (probably an unrealistic hope to begin with). However, I had many customers that took away small piles, and over time that added up well. I ended up selling about two-thirds of the clothes...not bad at all!

There was one more thing we were selling at the yard sale...baked goodies! A friend of mine, who has participated many times in the yard sale, told me that baked goods are great at drawing in more customers. So I made a batch of cinnamon rolls, a batch of orange rolls, and some caramel nougat bars. As the morning wore on, we also started selling water bottles. This turned out to be a good strategy...we had several people come up to our house, buy some food and water, then stay to shop. They didn't always buy our stuff, but it helped. And we sold ALL our rolls...they were a hit!

Lorelai really wanted to help with the yard sale, so I told her that she was in charge of the baked goods sales. Whatever money she brought in from the sales was hers to keep! She was very excited by this and managed to stay outside selling goodies for quite a while before getting bored and going inside to play. She ended up walking away with about $16, which she used later that day to buy an alarm clock...something she'd wanted for months! She was a very proud girl that day.

I would eventually sell some of the remaining clothes to friends via our local Rancho Sahuarita yard sale Facebook page (it functions essentially as a local Craigslist). What remained, I donated to Deseret Industries. I reserved a lot of the winter clothes that didn't sell, hoping to sell them to Twice As Nice in the fall...I guess I'll be selling off clothes for the rest of the year!

The yard sale wound down at around 12:30 pm. It was somewhat laborious work packing the remaining items away, but I felt pretty satisfied nonetheless. We'd turned a tidy profit (we made about $130), and we're reserving those funds to buy more (hopefully new!) clothes for the girls later this year. We'd also had fun helping Lorelai earn an alarm clock, and by emptying our closets. I was able to crash in front of the television for some of the afternoon session of General Conference, but sadly most of the speakers that day were a big blur to me. Hopefully when the next conference rolls around in October, I'll be able to focus on the lessons better.

I thought I would be traumatized to sell off all the baby clothes, but I didn't feel that way at all. Instead, I felt pleased and relieved to see the clothes pass on to new homes (some of which were homes of dear friends of mine). Maybe this means I've made some peace with my inner feelings. At any rate, if I do get pregnant again someday, I'm going to have to borrow some new clothes, because I gave away all my maternity clothes as well! It was a tiring weekend, but a satisfying one as well.