Fifty cents: Part one

Fifty Cents: Part one

They come out in the early morning before dawn. They scour the night landscape, they creep up your driveway quietly, carefully.They catch you unawares when you are still waking up – what big eyed nocturnal animal this is – you may wonder! Is it a quenda, a bilby or a tawny frog mouth – no! None of that. It is the garage sale fanatic otherwise known as the ‘treasuresorus rex.’

The actual garage.

Little did we know about the sub-culture that exists in cities like Perth of the bargain hunters. What a lovely crowd of people that just love a good deal.When you are set to downsize into a caravan I estimate that 90% of all your gear is surplus. Julie and I had a six-month rule in our household. If we don’t use something within six months it is gone, finished, vamoose. A good rule in theory but you would be surprised how much stuff gathers dust in places in your home you haven’t looked for in ages and how much work it takes to get it all out of your home. This is all about the 90% refuse. Selling our gear was such a rich mixture between pleasure and pain. There are those denim jackets, tennis bags full of rackets and many a tool unused. It is strange to feel the attachment to  running wild within your veins. At times when an older lady tried to walk away from the garage with a bag full of trinkets I felt like tackling her to the ground while yelling out loudly

“that snorkel is mine.”

One day while we were setting up for the garage sale I found Julie sobbing over a lacquered music box. She opened the music box and a ballerina appeared pirouetting in front of a little mirror. Through her tears Julie's crushed voice explained it was given to her by her Nanna when she was 11 years old. There is just no way that you can sell something like that.

The decision was made not to sell all the material excess that we had accumulated over the years and to keep the sentimental garbage.This strategy grew to six or seven packing boxes and most of our artwork that we are keeping with Julie’s parents. Gracefully they accepted to look after our leftovers.

Shift from this

 

And this

Three garage sales in total saw us shift our gear to other peoples homes, bins or their professional garage sales. We could have held three more and still wouldn’t have ‘flogged’ it all.

I must admit that two weeks after we stored those boxes I cannot for the life of me remember what’s in the boxes. And so, it may become a time capsule. Who knows what we may find when we reveal the secrets that lie in our time capsule a few years on. It will be proof of human’s obsessive, compulsive desire to hoard.

To this.

Tips for the semi-grey nomad

·         Set a time to indicate when you are open. We opened at 7am and finished about 12pm.

·         Place an eyecatching item in front of your house next to or on your garage sale sign eg:  
          balloons.

·         Advertise larger items like household furniture, white goods & special interest items on the
          Internet ie: e-bay  and/or Gumtree as you are likely to get a better price compared to selling
          these items at a garage sale.

In Western Australia good places to advertise garage sales are listed below:

·         Quokka

·         Saturday West Australian newspaper (they provided us with a garage sale pack including
          signage, tips for a successful garage sale and a tally sheet as a record of your sold items ).

·         Local newspaper.

·         Sunday Times.

·         Many of the above publications have an on-line classified section.