This year's town-wide yard sale was a bit of a mixed bag. As usual, it was scheduled for both Saturday and Sunday, with some people signed up for both days and others for only one. However, Saturday was chilly and damp, with predictions of steady rain throughout the day. It wasn't actually raining when Brian and I set out around 9am, but apparently the forecast had scared off a lot of potential sellers, because very few of the sales marked on the map were actually there. We walked all the way across town and encountered only two or three, and none of those had nothing of interest. Even Felton Avenue, which is usually teeming with sales, had only a sign alerting shoppers that they wouldn't be setting up until Sunday.
However, when we made our way to the central sale area—the big public parking lot behind the Reformed Church—our luck changed. Under the public pavilion, there was one table set up by The Moonladies, the proprietors of our town's former combined toy and gift shop, and another belonging to a local artisan. Together, these yielded a wealth of small gift items suitable for Christmas stocking stuffers, as well as a couple of mini rolls of novelty duct tape—one with rainbow stripes and one that glows in the dark—for a mere ten cents each. (We don't know exactly what we'll do with them, but we're sure they'll come in handy for something.)
On top of this, at the time we hit this sale, the thrift shop in the church basement was also open. We seldom manage to get to this store during its limited hours, so we seized the opportunity to go in and found that the place has been cleaned up quite a lot. They've moved everything except clothing out of the big main room, making it much easier to move around in there and view the selection. We didn't find anything we needed on the clothing racks or bookshelves, but Brian snagged one jigsaw puzzle off the game shelf for his parents. So, in the two hours of shopping we were able to get in before the rain got heavy, we managed to bring home about as much stuff as we typically do in a whole day. (I won't show a picture of Saturday's complete haul to avoid spoiling any holiday surprises.)
This morning, Sunday, the weather was bright and sunny, and the sales were much thicker on the ground. They also seemed to be better attended than Sunday's sales usually are, probably because Saturday had been such a washout. Shoppers weren't already tired out from a day of shopping on Saturday, and they were more enthusiastic about viewing sales that hadn't already been picked over. In the few hours we spent out and about on Sunday, we hit dozens of sales—but, surprisingly, we didn't come home with much more stuff than we had on Saturday. In total, we scored five books, another short-sleeved shirt for Brian (who declared after buying it that he was officially fully stocked for shirts of that type), another puzzle for his folks, a few spools of thread for a dime, a handful of small gift bags, and a board game that looked worth trying because it was free. Not exactly a bad haul, but not nearly as impressive as our finds from previous years. There were no big scores like our $70 futon, Brian's $10 kneeler chair, our $3 camp chair, or the previous day's $5 ukulele.
So, across both days, we shopped for about five hours and came home with:
- Six books
- Two puzzles
- One board game
- One shirt
- One ukulele
- Four spools of thread
- Six mini gift bags
- Two mini rolls of novelty duct tape
- A whole mess of stocking stuffers
Based on my back-of-the-envelope calculations, that's about $210 worth of stuff that we acquired for $21.40 total. That's a savings of $188.60, or $37.72 for each hour we spent shopping. Not as much as we make at our jobs, but a lot more fun.
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