With our departure from Australia coming closer and since we gathered so many things in the past three years that we lived here, we figured it would be time for a new typical Australian experience. A garage sale!
With not having visited a garage sale ever, we didn’t quite know what people would be expecting. We had daily practical items, furniture, white goods, some tools, kitchen utensils and kids stuff to sell. Hopefully enough to attract some people.
The first person showed up as we were carrying the first boxes outside. He was ready for a chat, so we were too. He ended up buying most of our tools.
Our second visitor was a professional looking garage sale person who showed up with a trailer about half an hour earlier than the announced time asking for watches and antiques. We had to disappoint him, as Luka’s K-Mart watch with seven different armbands was not likely to fall into his category.
Then Kai and Oliver were going off for a tennis tournament and Luka was invited for breakfast at a friends place. Therefore I was left alone and was still busy unpacking and trying to organize the setup when more and more people started coming.
I figured I would have plenty of time to gather the last items, disassemble the bed between the occasional visitor. The first hour and a half we had constant visitors and the bigger and smaller items all flew out. Amazing how many people we attracted. I never expected that turnout!
Then it slowed down considerably. Time to take some pictures, so I am not able to show a before and after version. Just the below in between one. We had an occasional visitor still coming in and sold about four of the below items still.
How we advertised
We held the sale on Sunday. As we do not have a garage, we named ours a yard sale.We started our marketing campaign on Thursday by putting up an announcement on our wall. We are lucky to be living on the road towards the school and close to the local Milk Bar, so that did get some exposure.
On Friday we put out signs around the primary school that Luka goes to. Hoping that would attract the families.
On Saturday we started our ‘online campaign’ on Gumtree. We (re-) posted some of the more attractive items and wrote a line or two about our yard sale. You can even put a Garage Sale announcement on Gumtree. In two days we had 240 people viewing that ad.
How do we rate our day?
I rate it as very successful. Tools and furniture were easy sellers. Kids things, not so much. We had no families visiting the yard sale, only a lady buying some things for her grandchildren.
The weather was on our side. It was a chilly, but sunny day. We had people just coming in for a chat, but that was nothing less then we expected. We consider that among the nicest things here in Australia. Conversations with random strangers about anything and everything. Darn, we will miss this country and it’s people!
Oh, and if you are still looking for a great purchase? I never got around to dismantling it and getting it into our yard. So our bed is still for sale:
europe2australia.com 