My wife and I have often thought about having a sale, but since we live in the middle of nowhere, its kinda pointless. We put our shit on ebay and have people give up twice what we thought we could get. 
oh well
An older, really out-of-it friend of my grandmother’s brought some stuff to sell at my grandmother’s yard sale. these desirable items included an opened (and half empty!) bag of Depends, various preserves and canned stuff from her cabinets and lots of undies. WHO, and I mean WHO, buys underwear at yardsales???! Or their friggin’ adult diapers for god’s sake??
This made me think of my brother’s neighbors. Every Christmas they put up a big ostentatious light/manger/Santa display. It was always up early and taken down immediately after the holidays. No one really knew them, but they were hated for their show-off better-than-you holiday lights (I’m sure most of you can understand this hatred).
Suddenly they got divorced. The husband moved out, and his wife had a big yard sale where she sold off his huge collection of porno mags and movies. It was so satisfying to know that the Christmas Light King was really just a big skanky pervert.
Just in case you don’t know, putting signs in the right of way is illegal almost everywhere. Even if it’s for a garage sale. And even if it’s just for a few hours. Call your Code Compliance Officer in your city to get more info.
Where can you legally put signs? Usually just your own front yard. So support legal advertising venues like classified ads and leave the ROW’s clear.
So what about those signs I see during the electons? Elect John Smith for 3rd councilman seat. Elect Bill Waterman for the district court. Makes the roads look horrible.
i don’t have a story to share, and i wanted to do a garage sale at one point.
but thankx to this thread, i’ll be more aware of what might happen…
goes to the yard to pick the most favorable rocks in throwing and practices targets
Not to threadjack this too much, but let me give a quick rundown on signs in the ROW.
The ROW is usually the shoulder of the road, the space between the road and the sidewalk, and/or the space between the road and the utility lines. Signs are almost always illegal in the ROW. Some cities do have exemptions for specific types of signs (like real estate) so that’s why you should contact the Code Compliance Officer in your area to be sure. Generally these types of sign violations are very low priority so they are not aggressively enforced. Many cities are complaint driven so they only respond to signs about which someone complains.
Political signs are generally not allowed in the ROW. If you contact the politician, they usually move them back. Political signs are usually granted special permission to be placed on private property even though other similar types of signs (like commercial signs) would not be allowed.
A couple of websites which deal with these “bandit signs” are http://www.causs.org and http://uglylitter.com.
Anyway…I’ve never had a yard sale, but my yard sale horror was when I bought a video transfer box. It’s a thingy you can use to project 8mm film and capture it on a video recorder. I was converting some of mom’s home movies and it was just what I needed. It was about 20 years old and I bought it for about $15. I tried it out and the picture looked horrible. I took apart the box and it was filled with cockaroach droppings. Ugh! Just threw it away.
I live in one law-breakin’ county then. There are signs all over the place - yard sales, lost pets, “Lose Weight Fast - Ask Me How” and who knows what-all. I honestly don’t know what the laws are here in Clay, but I’ve never left a sign out after a sale. In fact, I have 4 in the garage right now from the last sale I had.
I know some areas limit the number of yard sales you can have - so you can’t have a home business of having a yard sale every weekend, I guess. I’ve heard there are some places you need to get permits for yard sales. Guess we each need to learn what goes where we live.
I once had a joint rummage sale with my friend (she lives in town, I live out in the sticks). The funniest haggler was the woman who tried to talk me down from 25 cents to a dime on some old leather wallets I had put out. Give me a break – like a quarter will break you.
I think some people are more interested in “getting a deal” than getting something that they want. I bet that even if she bought the wallet, it just sat in the back of her closet.
Ohhh… That gives me a great idea. If I have a garage sale, I’ll put out total junk with high prices. People will talk me down and I’ll take it. They think they got a deal and I got rid of my trash. A win-win and everyone’s happy!
I go buy after sales, they often put the rest of it out on the sidewalk for free 
My wife & a friend held a joint garage sale to start at 8:00. At 7:15 or so, the home owner (her friend) left the house to take her kids to school.
My wife arrived at 7:30 to find a woman trying to pry the garage door open. When my wife asked what the hell she was doing, the woman replied, “Well, I’m sure it’s all in there”.
They had theft, too. A husband & wife team that would kind of make a flurry of activity, asking “how much for this & how much for that” all that while placing items in the bed of a pickup and whirling off with two or three items paid for 10 in the truck bed.
So, people who like and own porn are big skanky perverts?
:dubious:
This happened when we had a yard sale at my grandparents’ house after my grandmother died.
They live on a pretty ritzy street (had lived there for LONG before it became so posh), so the sale drew a lot of people looking for finds.
This one couple tried negotiating with me, and then my mother, and then with me again to get these two little picture frames, marked at $1 each, for $1 for the both of them. All in all, they spent 20 minutes trying to save a buck.
Neither my mother nor I gave in, however, because-
- it was the morning of the first day of a 2-day sale, and
- we had both seen them drive up in a ROLLS ROYCE!
Wanna know the easiest way to solve that?
Hey, well, all right, sir, here we go, then. What are you gonna give for it? I’m at 15 will you give me 20 dollar 20 make it 20 bid it at 20 25 make it 25 25 dollar make it five five five make it 25 …
Well, I sure am.
Btw, lainaf, how much did you buy?
Hoo boy, have I got a yard sale story.
I bought a bunch of books – mostly mechanical drawing textbooks – at my neighbor’s yard sale. This was a really nice quiet little family with the two kids, minivan, dog, cat, goldfish, etc.
Anyway, months after-the-fact I’m poking through one of the books when a I feel a lump inside the dust cover of one of the books. It was a yellowed envelope filled with polaroids. One has a young woman in a skimpy belly dancer outfit. Cute. The next one had a naked skinny boy with a 'fro and a 70’s pornstar moustache flexing his muscles. Okaaaay.
The next had these two, naked, with a dildo.
Oh shit. It’s my neighbors… having sex… in the 70’s.
Long story short I managed to smuggle them back into their garage and “drop” them behind their clothes drier.
Brace yourselves.
I bought this thousand dollar American Optics stereoscope and hundred dollar companion Bausch & Lomb focused illuminator at a garage sale back in 1984. It turns out that one of the secondary objectives in the 'scope was rattling around loose and I had to take it into a professional microscope dealer’s shop to get it fixed. This work cost me $20.[sup]00[/sup] more than I had laid out for the entire setup to get the repair work done.
Then again, I only paid $30.[sup]00[/sup] for everything.
Ow! Stop hitting me!
My God, Inky-, I’m without words… :eek:
Jess (off to count her Poloroids before she sells any more books on eBay)
Hehehe if those 2 guys had been arguing over my fan I’d have picked it up and tossed it right into the trash can. Ohh yeah! Then I would have laughed at their dumbfounded expression. The way I see it, when adults want to act like children they deserve to be treated like children. And that includes getting rid of the thing they must make such a fuss over. Ha ha ha!