The only people awake at 6:30am on a Saturday should be parents of young children, and older children who have to play Saturday morning sport for their school. Oh, and apparently those who are stupid enough to agree to participate in a garage sale beginning at 8am.

I don’t know how it started, but someone at work suggested holding a garage sale in the work car park, and whoever had some junk to get rid of could come and set up a stall. It sounded like a good idea, since it meant that we didn’t actually have to have one at our house, and we might be able to get a bit of money for the heap of crap that was just taking up room. So we put our names down and reserved our pick of the car parks for our stall. Over the last week or so, we brought our stuff in to work, as did the other participants, so we were all ready to come down bright and early today to set everything up and make a motza.

The alarm went off at 6:30 this morning, which is earlier than when we’re going to work on a weekday. So not only are we going to work on a Saturday, but we have to get up half an hour earlier! We dragged ourselves out of bed, and headed down. We arrived at 7:30 or so, and only 5 minutes later, a couple of prospective customers showed up. We told them they were early, and the sale didn’t start until 8, so they went away for a little while and we brought some tables out and unpacked our stuff.

They were back again 15 minutes later, but by then we’d set up most of it and they had a look around. I’d never been to, or held, a garage sale before, so I don’t know how many people usually turn up, but there weren’t that many people. It was a steady trickle, and we sold some stuff, making around $100 I think. I don’t know whether it was worth the effort though. There weren’t as many sellers as I thought there were going to be - only 4 of us. Still, we had a decent amount of stuff, and I think the others made around the same as we did.

At lunch time we decided to call it a day - there weren’t many people coming, and we figured that 4 hours hanging around at work was plenty. I think we were all pretty tired as well (at least, I was!), and I was looking forward to some lunch since we hadn’t had breakfast. We put our unsold stuff inside, then got some fish and chips.

Overall it was good to get rid of some stuff and make a bit of money, but I can’t imagine that we’d do it again. Trying to make up prices and hoping that people will buy your stuff is just too much hassle - next time the Salvos can have it all! Or I’ll put it on eBay.