Sweet Success

The garage sale was a HUGE success.  But I'm getting ahead of myself.  I thought you'd enjoy seeing some pictures of us unloading that first day at 6:30 am.

The garage was packed!  We couldn't even walk in it. 

Making progress

Unloading on the lawn in the wee hours. 

It took us about 2 hours to get everything out of the garage, and our house.  Even then, we had more stuff than we had tables for, so we put as much as we could out on tables and left the rest in boxes that lined the driveway.  By 9am, I had already taken about $500 inside!  

These pictures really don't do it justice.  There was SO much!  The one disappointment from day one had to do with our neighborhood signs.  One of our shoppers mentioned to me that one of our signs was damaged.  Hubs went out to investigate and found that one sign had been stolen, and another was intentionally kicked or hit, and damaged.  Hubs replaced the one that was missing and fixed the damaged one, but I was really upset by this.  People kept telling me that it was probably just some kid pulling a prank, after all, it was Spring Break.  But to me, it felt much more malicious.  This sale was so important to us.  Every dollar gets us one step closer to bringing Liesel home.  It almost made me want to cry; it was so offensive to my very soul.  But, we had to move on.  Friday was slammed.  We just made sure to pick up all our signs that afternoon.  Even with the sign debacle, we still made almost $1100 on day one!  It was amazing!

Day two was slower.  All of our big items were gone, and there were many sales in the neighborhood that day, so business dribbled in.  In spite of this, we still ended our day with around $800.  Our garage sale total was about $1850.  I sold approximately $280 worth of items on Craigslist prior to the sale, and I received $150 in cash donations the week before.  So all together, our sale netted us $2280!  In addition, we took all our left over books and movies to Half Price Books.  They paid $26 for all of them.  We also have three pieces of exercise equipment and two small tables in our garage that we are attempting to sell on Craigslist.  Just the books pushed us over the $2300 mark, but we are hoping that we can sell those other items and get closer to $2500!  

Here is what our garage looked like as of this morning. 

Unbelievable!  We probably sold about 3/4 of the donations. 

Hey, we can walk in here again!

Thank you so much to all who donated sale items, or your time.  We couldn't have done this without you!  Thank you also to those who prayed.  The weather was perfect, and we had plenty of shoppers.  This helped us get closer to our goal.  I added up all the remaining expenses and it looks like we'll still need about $4000, but that's much more manageable than when we started.  When we realized our shortfall, we were more like $12,000 short.  After the sale, we felt very blessed.  We are so ready for the next part, bringing Liesel home!