This coming Saturday, the convention center in Grand Forks is holding the 1st Annual Anything Goes Garage Sale, Flea Market, Swap Meet in it’s main arena/convention area.

They had originally hoped to attract 200 people to set up. They stopped taking registrations several weeks ago when 347 people had registered because they ran out of room to put them.

I’m wondering how many hundreds of people will be waiting in line at 8 am Saturday morning when they open the doors to the public. Will there be some people who will actually camp outside the entrance Friday night so they can be one of the first few in line?

It should be an interesting event and it will also be interesting to see how it affects the general garage sale situation in town both this weekend and for the rest of the summer.

Normally this time of year there would likely be between fifty and sixty fresh sales starting this weekend, so it will be interesting to see how many people want to compete with this sale. It will also be interesting to see if that many people taking part in the event will dramatically decrease the number of sales we see throughout the remainder of the summer.

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Just a few miscellaneous thoughts about my first weekend of serious garage saling.

Friday began at 5:30 am when I left the house for the 110 mile drive to Barnesville, Minnesota for the first day of their Spring City-Wide Garage Sale. It was a little cool when I left in the morning but by the time I got to Barnesville it had warmed up enough so that the shorts I was wearing were comfortable all day.

The “official” sale list and map showed 60 sales, but there had to be at least another 20 to 30 people who didn’t bother to get their sale on the list. While I didn’t buy as much as I did at their Fall Sale last year, there was still plenty of interesting stuff available. It took me between six and seven hours to cover them all and I came home with enough new inventory to definitely make the trip worthwhile.

Saturday was a little different. My list of new sales in Grand Forks contained only three sales. Saturday was a jeans, sweatshirt, and vest day and when I left home at 7:30 in the morning I had to brush the snow off the car windows before I got started.
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Cold and windy could best describe the weather this morning when I grabbed a cup of coffee from the Holiday gas station and headed for the first thrift store of the day.

There wasn’t much to get excited about at any of the thrift stores. My only purchase was a copy of “Where’s Waldo?” that I bought at the Dakota Boys Ranch for $1.00.

This will go into the book case along with two other Waldo books I already have. They will wait until I find one or two more and will then be listed as a lot on eBay.

These books are worth picking up when you can find them for a dollar or so.

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Today’s thrift store adventures can pretty much be summed up in one short sentence. “Six thrift stores, one book.” (Actually, I guess that isn’t even a sentence.)

The day’s lone purchase came at St. Vincent de Paul where I spent $.50 for “Blessing In Disguise”, book six in Lauraine Snelling’s “Red River Of The North Series”. It has found a place on the book shelf along with book one, two, three, and four from the same series. When I find book five they will be listed on eBay in the auction format.

This is Lauraine Snelling’s most popular series and the complete six book set will regularly bring between $30 and $45, sometimes a little more, on eBay.
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Today’s trip to the thrift stores in Grand Forks produced four different items to be listed on eBay. My original intention was to make one of them a “Fixed Price” listing and list the other three in the auction format starting next Sunday.

Somewhere between when I left the last thrift store and when I started writing the ads this afternoon I changed my mind with the result of all four items being listed in the Fixed Price format.

The Salvation Army thrift store had two sets of books by popular author Bodie Thoene. These were all marked $1 but they were having a half price promotion on books so my total cost for all eight books was $4.

The Shiloh Legacy, shown above, is a three book series. There have been ten of these sets listed on eBay in the last ninety days. Seven of them sold for prices ranging from $5.00 to $14.95 with an average sales price of $9.17. The other three didn’t sell. I listed them at a Fixed Price of $15.99 with free shipping.
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Fortified with a cup of “Dark Blend” coffee from a Holiday gas station and a sausage biscuit from the nearby Hardees I made a trip to all six of our local thrift stores this morning.

The first three stops were Dakota Boys Ranch, The Salvation Army, and Goodwill. I struck out at all three although I did see a nice Kodak 4600 Carousel slide projector that would have been a bargain at $5. On closer inspection though, the lens was cracked making it pretty much useless.
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The number of garage sales in Grand Forks has fallen off considerably over the last two to three weeks and the last couple Saturdays have seen only six to ten new sales. There’s nothing to suggest that tomorrow will be any different, so I’m hoping a little travel will make tomorrow more productive than if I stayed in town.

I’ll be leaving the house sometime between 5:00 and 5:30am Saturday morning and, fortified with a large cup of strong black coffee, will make the 110 mile drive to Barnesville, Minnesota for their area-wide Fall Rummage Sale.

That means burning a lot more gas than staying in town would, but according to their ad in the Fargo Forum there will be more than forty rummage sales in Barnesville and the surrounding area. That many sales is just too tempting to pass up this time of year.

Tomorrow I’ll let everyone know whether it was a wise decision or not.

Photograph by brendan.lally.

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Going to garage sales last week was a lot like going to a FOL or AAUW book sale. It seemed like everywhere I looked there were books.

Thursday there were 16 garage sales in Grand Forks and the only thing I bought were books. Friday wasn’t much different. There were 29 fresh garage sale and I spent $59.50 for books and only $8.00 for anything else. The 26 fresh sales on Saturday did produce quite a few non-book items, but there were still books to be looked at and purchased.

The second sale I stopped at on Friday turned into a book buyer’s bonanza. The ad said nothing about books but when I stopped to look at a box of teacher’s aids, the lady running the sale asked if I was interested in books. When I told her ‘yes”, she told me the back patio was filled with books.
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Part of Grand Forks is undergoing a lot of street repair right now. A lot of streets are blocked off making getting around a challenge. One sale this morning was located on a short street that, due to the construction, was particularly difficult to get to.

An early start time along with an ad in the newspaper that would make any serious garage saler’s mouth water insured that all the die-hards were there early waiting for the garage door to go up. All except one that is. The ad mentioned books and one of Grand Forks’ serious book buyers was nowhere to be seen.

Finally, just as the garage door started going up our missing book buyer was spotted rounding a corner a block away on foot. After spending fifteen minutes trying to figure out how get through all the construction, he’d abandoned his car three blocks away and began walking.

The moral of the story - if you put the right words in your garage sale ad people will do just about anything to have a chance to buy what you have for sale.

The question of the story - everyone else was able to find a way to drive right up to the sale. Why couldn’t he? Perhaps it had something to do with the fact that he’s a college professor in the real world.

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The photo to the left is what I saw out my windshield as I was waiting for one of today’s garage sales to open.

I woke this morning to eleven new garage sales in the paper and to between 1.5″ and 2″ of new snow on the ground. To make it more enjoyable, the snow had a lot of moisture in it, making the residential streets in town slipperier than they had been all winter.

One of the sales was postponed until next Saturday, but everyone else just toughed it out, put on their winter coats, shoveled their driveways, and opened up on schedule.

The pickings were kind of slim. My purchased amounted to:
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