Yard-sale haul 2026

This year's town-wide yard-sale weekend—normally one of my favorite occasions of the year—didn't get off to a great start. When we set out on Saturday morning, it was cold and grey out, and I was shivering even under four layers of clothing. The weather seemed to have deterred a lot of sellers, too. Many of the sale sites marked on the official map weren't actually there, and many others were just tables or piles at the curb labeled "free," where the hosts had evidently decided the few bucks they might earn from their stuff weren't worth spending the morning out in the chill.

So, after finding only a couple of small items, Brian and I decided to abandon the map and focus on the few parts of town that were sure things. We started at the library, which always hosts its fundraising book sale on yard-sale weekend. Despite the tempting prices, we kept our purchases moderate, knowing that we'd have to carry them with us for the rest of the morning. We came away with just seven books totaling $10—mostly fiction, plus a cookbook titled The Voluptuous Vegan that will probably be the source for October's Recipe of the Month.

That $10 worth of books, as it turned out, accounted for most of the day's spending. Although we visited several other hotbeds of sale activity—Felton Avenue, the parking lot behind the Reformed Church, and after lunch, a long swath of Lincoln Avenue on the north side—most of the items we actually picked up were from free piles. By the end of the day, we'd acquired a total of eight books, three board games, a small skillet, an assortment of cooking ingredients, a bicycle taillight, a set of flavored lip balms, and a small bagful of scallion bulbs for planting, and we'd only spent $15.50.

After Saturday's experience, I took extra care to bundle up before setting out on Sunday, but it proved unnecessary. Although the air wasn't much warmer, the sun was out, so I ended up shedding my coat and stuffing it into one of our bags within the first half hour. And the sun seemed to be shining on our excursion, too, as we found a lot more useful items for sale this time around. Over the course of the morning, we scored a couple of Pyrex storage containers, assorted office supplies, a string of battery-powered holiday lights, a couple of potential holiday gifts, and a Philips screwdriver to replace our old one that's stripped out. (This last one was something Brian had been explicitly looking for, and the sale where he happened to find it was at the home of a former coworker, so we had a nice chat with him as well.) Our most fortuitous find was a couple of sealed packages of our favorite hand soap from Trader Joe's, which, as we discovered on our last trip, has just been discontinued because the supplier has gone out of business. With luck, these four extra bars will be enough to get us through until the store finds a new supplier to work with. After returning home with three full bags and $13.50 less in my wallet, we decided we'd done well enough that we didn't need to go back out in the afternoon.

However, that wasn't quite the end of our sale adventures. Today, we returned to the library, which was disposing of the leftovers from the book sale at just $5 per bag—no matter how big or how full that bag happened to be. Since the prices were so good, and since we didn't have anyplace to go afterward but back home, we were much less selective this time around, stuffing our bag with a total of 14 books (mostly mysteries and science fiction). So, all told, we spent $34 over the course of the weekend—exactly twice as much as last year—and acquired a pretty good mix of entertaining and practical items. And we've made a nice start on this year's holiday shopping, too.