Day to Day Sisters: Garage Sale!

It's that time of year again...GARAGE SALES! I'm not a huge garage saler, but I do enjoy going to them every once in a great moon. I have to be in the right frame of mind and it needs to be nice weather. Plus, I really don't like getting up early, not a morning person, so I probably miss all the good stuff.

Here in my small little speck on the map, we have a city wide garage sale. It now starts on Friday afternoon through Saturday. So if you want to get the really good deals you have to take off of work on Friday and head out that morning.

If your an extremely organized person and prepared, a little OCD, you get a hold of the garage sale list that the paper puts together and you research it to see what sales have what you need and map out your plan...I've never been that organized, always wanted to be though.

This year I didn't go to any sales, instead my friend and I had our own garage sale {at her house, Thank God!}

My motivation to the kids to get rid of all the ~~crap~~ wonderful toys they have, is that they get to put their initials on the little colored dot and they get to keep the money! They are all about keeping the money! We went through all of their books from when they were babies. This was harder for me then I anticipated. Actually, I hadn't anticipated it being anything except cleaning out their closets. But many of the books brought back so many memories from when they were babies and toddlers. {sigh}

My big items to sell were my red couch and green chair/ottoman. They are both the over sized kind of furniture.

This is a picture of the red couch {kind of} it's off the Slumberland website, but remember ours was bought in 2000 or 2001.

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This is the green chair and ottoman.

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Now, WHY, you ask, am I showing you furniture that already sold? Well, let me tell you, it is a great Seinfeld worthy story.

On Friday afternoon, while I was working the garage sale solo, this lady comes in. She looks at the furniture, sits on it, walks around it and actually looks interested. We already bought a new sectional so at this point I just really, really want to sell it. It isn't coming back home with me, if I don't sell it I'm not sure what I'm going to do with it. We talk about the couch, she lifts the cushions and sits on it some more. Finally, she asks me if I'll take a lower price than what I'm offering. What am I going to say but OF COURSE!

"Great" she says, "Wonderful" I say! SOLD!

Then she proceeds to go get a tape measure out of her mini van because she lives about 35 minutes away and she wants to take it home with her right now and she wants to make sure it will fit...In.Her.MINI.Van.

What?! Seriously?!

Now, I'm not a very good judgment of fitting furniture into vehicles, but there is NO way, my over sized couch, chair and ottoman are fitting in her mini van!

But after she measures it out and informs me that her seats all fold into the floor, that it will indeed fit in there, if we just manipulate it a little. Manipulate my a** - to me it looks impossible.

So she backs up her mini van into the driveway and takes everything out of the back, which includes a Little Tykes wagon, mind you! We each grab an end of the couch. I'm not a muscular person. I don't really have any upper body strength and my muscles are still sore from putting the trampoline together earlier in the week! She doesn't look like she has much upper body strength either and she is shorter than me, which means her arms are shorter than mine, which means it is really hard for her short, little arms to get a good hold on the over sized couch!!! {deep breath}

We take all the cushions off and set them aside and carry the couch to the back of her mini van. I'm already a little out of breath from this. {oh my!} There are a few people now that have come to the garage sale and are giving us strange looks like "you dumb women, you can't fit an over sized couch into the back of a mini van alone, but with an over sized chair and ottoman too? NO WAY!"

She thought that if we could get the couch in half way then FLIP {yep I said FLIP} the green chair over and onto the couch it should fit. So we get the couch in half way and it actually looks like it might fit. We get the green chair upside down and on the edge of the couch. Nope, not gonna go in, we have about an inch that we need to maneuver it to get it in. It's just too tight. we realize that if we take the small legs off the chair that helps, but we still just can't get it. It was like a big life size version of Tetris!

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I love Tetris, but at this point I'm really starting to hate it. There is no *ksjkl*ing way this is going to work! I'm starting to get really sore and I've lost hope. The good news is that I thought this was really funny so I'm laughing hysterically while we do this. My laughter started getting a little manic I think. Not sure if the lady who bought it thought it was quite as funny as I did.
So we figure out if we take the chair out and turn it around while it is upside down it might just give us that inch that we need. Sure as Hell, it did. After quite a bit of shoving and sweating the SOB went in. I.CAN.NOT.F-ING.BELIEVE.IT! So here is the proof of what we did!!!