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Sunday, April 29, 2007

Making Money out Garbage

I realize I hadn't posted in a few days (there was a deadline for my post last night). I thought I would explain what I've been up to and why I've been too tired to post. A few months ago a bunch of us were sitting around a friend's dining room table discussing our moms group. A co-leader needed to step down for personal reasons and thus needed to be replaced. One of my friends was toying with the idea of becoming the new co-leader. Suddenly I heard myself volunteering to organize our annual yard sale, if Lindsay were to become the new co-leader. Either my ears were deceiving me, or I had a death wish. I still can't believe I did that. Let me just explain that our yard sale is our big fundraiser and requires so much work that we usually have to cajole someone into running it. Since I didn't want to back out, I figured I would do it this one time and give it my all.

At the end of January/beginning of February, I was able to find a location for our yard sale, get the rental fee waived (we're a non-profit), and secure the date. I let the chapter know when it was and what type of help I would need. Everything seemed under control. Our member in charge of publicity had the ads from last year, and she was able to get it submitted to several papers once the date and time were updated. Again, everything seemed fine. In fact everything was running smoothly until this past Wednesday. All of the sudden I started getting complaints about just about everything, and questions about things that I thought had been clearly stately since February. I could feel my blood pressure shooting up. My poor playgroup had to listen to me rant as did a couple of my friends who had innocently called about something else.

Last year's yard sale made $900 which was a record. I was looking to make about $600. However, this was completely dependent on what people donated. There was no way to know ahead of time. I have to admit I was nervous. We really depend on the profits from the yard sale for our budget. We hire speakers and defray the costs for kids activities and moms nights out.

We were using a church for the yardsale. My church in fact. Friday was our dropoff. The first few people brought in their donations. I breathed a sigh of relief. There was a lot of stuff, and it was all in good condition. The "set up crew" and I started to organize things. Every time I turned around there were heaps of additional donations. I swear I have never seen so much stuff at a yard sale before (with the exception of free church yard sale I went to a few years ago.) There was so much stuff I started to panic. At one point the piles were out the door and into the lobby. I was grateful that people had donated stuff, and I was encouraging them to bring more, but I wondered if we were going to be able to go home on Friday night or if we would be there straight through until the yard sale on Saturday.

After having a friend call up members and ask them to drop everything and come in and help out (which was awesome!) we finally got everything set up. I wish I had taken a picture of the people from my church who stopped in on their way to a church class. Let's just say our student minister was in shock and looked doubtful that everything could be cleared out for coffee hour on Sunday. Again, the amount of stuff was amazing. At about 11:40 pm, I was able to go home. After moving heavy objects and being on my feet since 4, I was more than ready to leave.

The next day we had a ton of people waiting outside before the yard sale even started. I managed to ruffle some feathers by deciding to open the yard sale early. The cashier told me that the longest pause she had between customers was 3 minutes, and that wasn't even until the end. What cracked me up were the types of things that were purchased. Some of our really good quality stuff like furniture, kids toys, and good quality strollers and high chairs were untouched (unlike other years where they were the first to go), but hideous art work, free proflower.com vases, and this scary toy basket that one member and I even debated throwing out because it was so gross sold. Throughout the yard sale, we just kept on unearthing more and more items as stuff sold and we had room to better display the items that had previously been shoved under tables. After it was over, we moved all the leftovers outside. A couple people had posted on freecycle.com that we were having a free yard sale at 1 pm (the yard sale ended at noon) and the Big Giraffe posted the same notice on Craig's list. Lots of people came. What wasn't taken was loaded into a couple minivans and taken to the Salvation Army.

So what was our grand total? After taking into account costs, we made $1,253.21. I slept until 11 am today.

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Name:Alex Elliot
Home:MA, United States
About Me:Professional Mom of two cats, a dog, an ant farm, and oh yeah...two boys: a 6 year old and a 3 year old. Also found in my house is my husband who is known on this blog as The Big Giraffe.
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For those of us who didn't get an instruction manual with our babies and for whom parenting hasn't always gone as planned. On a more serious note this blog is about supporting a woman's ability to make her own choices about parenting including the choice, for whatever reason, to bottle feed her babies formula.

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