The Neighborhood Yard Sale!!!

Picture from Google Images

I haven't blogged in a week and it feels like forever. I've missed my daily reads and visits with everyone. It's been quite hectic here for the past week. This weekend was my neighborhood's twenty first annual yard sale. This happens every year at the end of August and it's a BIG DEAL. Our yard sale is well established, gets promoted and brings thousands of visitors to our neighborhood. Last time I counted there were over one hundred families participating this year. Since my daughter Kate graduated from university this May and moved to NYC (you can read about that here), our basement has been on overload. So, there was no doubt Buttermilk Cottage would be there with the rest of everyone else!

Have you ever done a yard sale? If so, you know the incredible amount of work involved. First is the sorting--what to sell, what to keep, what's not worth selling or keeping... Then the pricing, which we quickly decided not to agonize over, just price it already! The above shot is in our basement as we start the process.






Next, things get moved upstairs (oh my back!!!) into their staging position, before they can be moved to the driveway. My poor, and usually quite pretty, entryway was that spot.



Here we are ready for business. The offical yard sale day is Saturday, but because the sale is so well known, people begin to set up earlier and earlier each year. We set up Thursday evening, so we'd be ready to sell Friday morning. And, I do mean Friday MORNING. When we went out to remove the covers from our "goodies" at 6:30 AM, I found a man already there, perched over a table with his flashlight shining brightly!




A few of our "choice" items...

Did I tell you about my daughter's shoe fetish??? Actually, she's not totally responsible for the number of shoes we had for sale. Nancy and I contributed a few too.

This picture of Kate's old stuffed animals and the next one of her shoes, almost seem to capture her essence from babyhood to young woman. Ahhh....

Did I mention Kate's shoe fetish???

At last, OPEN FOR BUSINESS, and the customers! We did a brisk business all day Friday. However, our main focus was on Saturday...

Last year, we didn't have enough "stuff" to participate in the yard sale, so we did a "Bistro" on the porch. We had so much fun with it, that we couldn't bear not to do it again.

I'll tell you all about that next time!