I'm not even going to beat around the bush on this one. Every year, I have a garage sale and every year, I say NEVER again.
I did it. Okay?
There I said it.
Well, I guess this year was a little different but only by location.
A few weeks ago, I was stopped at a traffic light and I glanced over at the electronic billboard sign outside of city hall. It flashed from one topic to another.
Concert in the Park - Sunday, June 23
One day trash pick up delay - Thursday, July 4
Junk in the Trunk Community Wide Garage Sale, Greenwood Farm - Saturday, July 13
Did someone say garage sale??
At first I thought that it would just be something fun to attend but then I talked to my friend, Angela, and we decided we should set up a table. You remember, Angela. She's my
hoarder's house, flea market, garage sale, tree lawn picker partner. She refinishes furniture and I look for vintage items to resell so this seemed like the perfect opportunity to hawk some of our wares. Unlike my sign on the corner and half-inch ad in the local paper, this sale was being promoted on the news, radio and newspapers so we just knew we would make a killing!
In fact, since I already have a PayPal account, I upgraded my phone and ordered a free card reader so that we could accept credit cards. Oh my gosh! It was going to be like shooting fish in a barrel!
Yeah...not so much.
The sale started at 9:00 but for some reason, we were required to be there at 7AM.
Yes.
7 freakin' AM.
I knew that would require me to wake up by at least 5:30 so that I could take the dogs out, feed them and double check that my car was packed and ready to go. I trieeeedddd going to sleep early but it just didn't happen and I ended up only getting about 5 hours of sleep.
We had loaded up two cars but we were only allowed to keep one in our designated space so the other (mine) had to be unloaded to allow for the other vendors to set up. The man who was directing the traffic was very adamant about me unloading quickly and moving my car. Well, Chrissy on 5 hours of sleep doesn't respond well to being told what to do and I looked over at Angela and she was raising her right arm up and down slowly at me and saying, "Chrissy....."
You know, like when someone is pointing a gun and they tell them, "Put the gun down....put it doooownnnn."
We started to set up our table and display our stuff when this woman in her late 60's came over and introduced herself.
"Hi Ladies! I'm Sherry. I just wanted to be friendly since we'll be next to each other all day."
"So Sherry," I say. "Did you participate last year? Was it really busy?"
"Oh yes! It was wonderful! You girls are going to love it!"
I looked at Angela and we were both really excited that we weren't going to have to pack all this stuff up at the end of the day because it was going to sell!
We got our first small sales of the day right away and that was encouraging. But then we noticed that lots of people were coming to our space but they were just kind of glancing at things. I don't know about you, but when I go to flea markets or garage sales, I dig through stuff, hold things up and make sure that there isn't anything I'm missing.
That wasn't happening.
There was a decent amount of traffic but there weren't a lot of shoppers. Except for this one guy. He was on the hunt for vintage pieces and he kept walking past with loads of things to take to the car and then coming back. It was a hot day and we even noticed that he must have gone home to change his sweat stained clothes before he made another trek around the grounds.
Sherry was talking loudly on her flip phone to someone that she was going to go "meet at the gate". It looked like Sherry was going have a helper. This older late 60's woman joined her and Sherry pointed out a table that Angela had redone. Admittedly, it's a color and style that you either really love or really hate. We've listed it on eBay and Etsy for $75 but Angela priced it at $40 hoping for a quick sale.
Helper woman walked over, asked me how much the table was and when I told her, turned to Sherry and muttered, "Never!"
The rest of the day she was known as the C-word. She scowled at everything, bitched about the heat and threw daggers our way if we were laughing too loud. We decided that she must be employed in a nursing home where she surely abused the patients. Later we found out that she worked for an answering service so it appeared that the only abuse she doled out was over the phone.
This is C-word
We sat in the hot sun for almost 8 hours for what turned out to be a pittance. So I walked to the back of the property to retrieve my car, sweat pouring down my face and almost got into a fist fight with a man who insisted that I was parked too close to him. Hot and crabby Chrissy might be slightly worse than tired Chrissy.
Greenwood Farm holds the oldest remaining house in the city, built in 1908 and I've been fascinated by it ever since I was a little girl. When you drive down that section of Richmond Road, you pass bungalow after ranch after bungalow. And then you see the Greenwood Farm house sitting back 1000 feet from the road, rising up in all its three-story glory. Every time we drove by, I would ask my father, "Who lives there? Can we go visit?" And every time, he said he didn't know so we couldn't go visit.
One of the "perks" of the Junk in the Trunk sale that I looked forward to the most was the opportunity to tour the home. I'll share it with you on Saturday in C Cleveland.
This time, I SWEAR, I am never participating in or having another garage sale!
Until next time...
