Yard sale retrospective

Judging from the paucity of ads, the yard sale season has about come to a close.

I now know a whole lot about how to run a yard sale, should I ever get energetic enough to host one. Such as:

• Advertise in the paper, on the main road, and in front of your house. You don't want people passing you by because they're not sure if you're having a sale or just a messy garage.
• And make your signs big enough to read.
• Advertise specific items. Ninety percent of yard sale ads center on the phrase, "lots of misc.," which any seasoned yard sale shopper knows means tacky Christmas decorations and old shoes.
• Put prices on things. Nobody wants to stand in line in the sun waiting for you to remember what you wanted to charge for that thingymabob.

I try to keep my yard sale shopping in check by mostly limiting myself to sales within walking distance of our house, which I can hit while out walking with D1 on Friday mornings. Only two times this season did I decide to drive to exceptionally juicy-sounding yard sales. Both were worth it.

Best finds of the year:

• Four-foot high clear plastic drawers. ($5) I thought this would be a great place to keep D1's toys. It was, for awhile. Now it is itself her favorite toy. She loves pushing the drawers out and back in, taking things out of one drawer and putting them into another, and hiding behind it.
• Nursery-school chair. ($.50) D1 loves sitting (and standing) on this. It's the only chair I've ever seen that is really short enough for a one-year-old. It fits perfectly in a little cubbyhole between the office bookshelf and filing cabinets.
• Plastic picnic table. ($15) Yes, I broke down and now have Little Tykes plastic in my house. It was cheap. And now D1 has her own table in her room, of suitable height to climb on without catastrophic injury should she fall off. I'm still looking for something more charming someday, but in the meantime D1 isn't getting any younger.
• Silver nativity set. ($10) I have really wanted a nativity set for some time, but had found none that I cared for at all. I thought about this one at $20, and decided against it. Then I told DOB about it and he decided to go see if it was still there the next morning. Not only was it, it was marked way down.