When Sherry and I hosted our first yard sale over four years ago, we felt hurried getting everything outside, stressed about pricing, and kept tracking how much we’d made as the day went on. We were so excited to sell things we no longer wanted that the event became bigger in our heads than it needed to be.
Fast forward a few years (we also held a moving sale back in 2010) and in 2012 we decided to do another clear-out yard sale. This time we had a much more relaxed approach. Our plan was simple:
- Make decluttering the primary goal; any money earned would be secondary.
- Sell higher-value items on Craigslist ahead of time to avoid wrangling them during the sale and to get a better price.
- Price everything else to move quickly—if someone was interested, we wanted them to walk away happy, even if the price was low.
Between moving to our current house (where some things didn’t fit as well as in our first home) and accumulating items for various blog and book projects, rooms in our house had turned into storage. The playroom, basement and even our sunroom were filling up. It was time to send lots of items off to new homes where they’d be used and to free up three rooms for real, functional purposes.
We kept the sale relatively low-key for safety and manageability: we didn’t want to publish our home address to the whole internet, and we didn’t want to pay to move everything to a neutral location. So we used classic methods—signs and a Craigslist ad that didn’t reveal our identity—and trusted neighbors and passerby traffic to bring in buyers.
Even with a casual vibe, some planning was necessary. We spent time deciding what to part with, sorting closets, cabinets, and whole rooms. If something hadn’t been used in a while and we couldn’t name a concrete future purpose for it, we moved it to the sale pile. That pile lived in our sunroom for days and, early on the sale morning, everything made its way out to the driveway.
Our inventory included items from both our household and my sister’s. Some display tables were not for sale. We consciously chose not to price everything in advance because the goal was to purge, not to maximize profit. That meant many items were priced lower than they could have been, but they moved quickly and most buyers left with something. Small items on tables and blankets were often a dollar or less, while larger pieces like chairs, dressers, and bookcases were priced a bit higher. If your aim is purely to make money, you might price higher, but you’ll likely sell less.
We didn’t capture many photos during the busiest stretches because we were occupied with customers. The shots we did take were during quieter moments—after around 60% of our items had already sold.
The crowd was strong until about 10am. When traffic slowed, we decided to speed things up by lowering prices considerably. Kids’ clothes went five for fifty cents, pillows two for a dollar, and some leftover items—like an old ladder left by the previous owners—earned “free” stickers. At that stage, getting things out of the house mattered more than sitting in the driveway all day.
Clara wasn’t in the thick of the sale; her Grammy took her out after she woke around 8am. She returned mid-morning and spent part of the day drawing in the driveway, adding a wholesome charm to the scene.
By noon our inventory had dwindled to a handful of larger items and about 30 small things that fit into two Goodwill boxes. We posted a curb alert on Craigslist for the remaining big pieces and labeled some items “free.” The curb alert worked—those items were picked up within a few hours. The beauty of curb alerts is that you don’t have to be home when people come to claim items, which allowed us to drop off the Goodwill donations without interruption. Yard sale rule: nothing comes back into the house.
By day’s end we earned roughly $350 from the sale itself. Factoring in Craigslist sales completed beforehand, our total approached $650. Not a windfall, but a satisfying return for the time spent and, more importantly, a major reduction in clutter. We sold eight old dining chairs to someone planning to recover them and two extra new dining chairs for our original purchase price; the buyer later sent a photo of them being enjoyed on her porch.
The main lesson was practical: if our priority had been to maximize earnings, we could have listed more items on Craigslist. However, photographing, listing, and coordinating pickups consumes time. For our goal of clearing space quickly and efficiently, a large, well-priced yard sale did the trick. The relaxed approach felt freeing, and it showed us we don’t need to be stressed about hosting a sale. We’re likely to hold them more often to prevent clutter from piling up again.
Have you hosted a yard sale lately? Any tips or memorable moments? We had one sticky moment when Sherry accepted payment for an item I’d already promised to someone else. Neither buyer wanted to back down, so we resolved it the old-fashioned way: a coin toss decided who took it home. Problem solved.