July and the Garage Sale

The plan was to sell the Washington house as soon as possible and to spend the month of July with my wife and son who would visit from our other home in Kansas until the beginning of August. After the house was sold in mid July, we would spend the rest of the month bouncing from house to house, relatives to friends until it was time to drive back to Kansas together. Most of our belongings would go into storage that was easily accessible from my place of work in Washington, and after my Kansas visit, I would start another year of bouncing between working in Washington and working remotely from Kansas.

That was the plan.

The plan changed when my wife and son surprised me a week early and showed up on my birthday before the final week of my job’s fiscal year push. It was a good surprise. I had not seen them in almost a month and in the high stress of getting the house ready to transition to the new buyers and my company’s busiest time of the year, it was pretty great to come home to hugs instead of an emptying house that sounded more and more hollow with every Craig’s List sale.

There were to-do lists everywhere during the last week of June. I was working on my accounts for a great job that I had grown to love deeply over the last three years and that meant pushing hard on the email machine from early morning until late at night. In between those spurts of activity after work, I spent my time with my wife getting the house ready for sale. Seriously, there was very little romantic distraction. We were on three time tables, and beside the point, we were saving it all up for our anniversary which we celebrate most years on July first.

The first day of July is a great day in my world. The fiscal year is over, and everyone breathes a sigh of relief and takes a well earned break for a few days. I had put in for the vacation days weeks before-hand. Although my wife and I would be busy during the day feverishly getting details sorted out for the house, at least we would be able to be together and maybe even have a nice dinner to celebrate our eleven years of marriage.

I was awakened on my day off to emails bombarding my phone, then text messages. The chatter was far too loud for the day after the fiscal year end. I got suspicious something bad was happening at work but I wasn’t there to know what it was. Meetings were being called that looked very important. One of my work buddies sent me a text message asking if I was coming in that day. When I replied that I wasn’t, he said that he thought I should. But that’s his sense of humor. It was a joke. Right? Right?

Most of my team had been laid off along with many others as part of a rumored giant reorganization and budget cut. I wasn’t completely surprised because the gig was a contracted, year-to-year position. The mistake I made was thinking I was valuable, that my particular DNA code was the only code that made sense to keep in that position.

Remember the plan I spoke about earlier? This little bump wasn’t in it either. Had the plan been written down on a piece of paper, at this point I would have donned protective goggles, taken the plan out to the middle of our driveway, set it down under a rock and lit it on fire with a blowtorch.

This news was a game changer like no other. With our momentum, this new direction would be like going to watch the Seahawks play the Denver Broncos and right after the coin is flipped, they all just decide to play baseball instead.

Now all that stuff that was going to go into storage needed to be sorted through into what we keep and what we get rid of and we gave ourselves two large shipping crates to fill. After that, it belongs to the world.

The new plan was to sell the house and get back to Kansas as a family, for the rest of our year commitment out there as soon as possible. I would look for work and we would all try and remember what life was like before I became a part time husband and father. In other words losing my job was about to become one of the best things to ever happen to me, for now I didn’t have to ping-pong back and forth between job and family.

There are several aspects to this whole July experience that I would love to share, but since this has been a bit of a drag to read so far, I feel like I need to end with one of my favorite parts of the ordeal, which was the garage sale.

Our house was located in the culturally diverse neighborhood of East Hill in Kent, Washington. There are wonderful people there, who are kind, polite and treat garage sales as a craft they have devoted their lives to. We weren’t ready for this.

My wife Wendy loved the idea of having a garage sale to get rid of a bunch of our stuff as well as make a little money, now that one of us wasn’t currently dragging home sacks of gold from the mine each week. Her sister had told her that the best day to hold a garage sale is on a Friday. I had always heard Saturday, but in this day and age of non-traditional workdays, I figured it was worth a shot. So Thursday night I placed an ad for a garage sale on Craig’s List and that morning we got up very early to set out our items on the driveway.

Wendy was very methodical to how she set it up; like she was merching the display window for Bloomingdale’s. I kept shaking my head. I figured that at the end of the day, we would have 82% of what we had placed out for sale.

“How are we going to price this stuff Wendy?” I asked, wondering if I should start affixing masking tape with low decimal numbers.

“Everything is a buck,” Wendy said to me without a hint of sarcasm.

“Everything is a dollar?” I re-checked.

“Everything,” She said. She was serious. She was absolutely serious.

I looked at the Spider-Man Monopoly game and figured that was about right. It was still shrink wrapped. Then I looked at the two pairs of shrink wrapped downhill skis with the price tags on them saying $200, and something didn’t seem quite right. I had this odd feeling that $1 did not equal $200. I pulled out my iPhone and selected the calculator app. I figured that if I subtracted $1 from $200 and the answer was close to zero, that this would be a fair deal. But if the answer was more than say, $2.75 then perhaps we should revisit the pricing. The answer was $199 and according to my number line is quite a ways away from $2.75, let alone a dollar.

Wendy didn’t like that I kept testing her either.

“How much for that humidifier?”

“A dollar.”

“How much for that shovel?”

“A dollar.”

“How much for this finishing nail?”

“A dollar.”

“A dollar for this finishing nail, seriously?”

She stopped and gave the finishing nail a squinty-eyed appraisal. “Well,” she said as she screwed up her face, “fifty cents?”

“You can get a box of fifty at the hardware store for about three dollars,” I pointed out with as little condescending tone as possible, but there must have been trace levels.

“Fine smart guy, what do you want to price it as? Because I’m not going to be making change for pennies out here, we have stuff to do,” and Wendy was right, time was of the essence.

“So maybe we’ll just price it as we go then?” I asked the obvious.

“Yuh think?” said the doctor in a tone more befitting a cartoon moose.

The ad said the sale started at 9am and by noon it seemed like we were just rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic, except they weren’t on the Titanic, our deck chairs were holding up some stuffed animals and then we put them over by the mildew re-enforced tent. It made more sense to include them in our “outdoor” selection along with the camp grill and the skis. Picture the worst REI store ever and then set fire to that store. What the firemen retrieve from that store is about what we were selling.

Our neighbor pulled up and asked if we wanted more people to come to our yard sale. We said no. But then immediately after, realizing that the dry sarcasm doesn’t often translate into Ukrainian we said of course we would. She called her father, and that’s when the ball started rolling.

I don’t think our neighbor’s father, who showed up literally five minutes later all smiles and ready to buy SOMETHING, was the catalyst to what happened next but if he was, I suspect it went down like this: He gets a call from his daughter to come to our garage sale. He then tweets to his Garage Sale King twitter account with 6,000 followers that there is a hot sale in Kent. Every single follower gets in the closest vehicle they have and heads to our house.

The truth is that people just started dropping by.

The first vehicle was a late 90’s Toyota Four Runner. The woman driving came out of the vehicle and she was all business. She had four delightful young children with her—seriously—and started pointing to all kinds of items. The kids all picked out some toys and I even went and found a dart for the crossbow the little boy was interested in (suction tipped, but powerful).

By the time she was finished, our driveway had considerably less inventory than before. The woman had purchased both of our large area rugs and matching runner as well as several other bulky items. She had to tie items to the roof. I wondered if she needed us to watch a few of her children while she used the limited space in her vehicle to shuttle her new-to-her crap home. She didn’t. Her kids were all smiles pinned against the windows with their new treasures as the Four Runner bore the fruit of a tremendously successful shopping day and of the driver’s loins.

What surprised me most was what the people wanted to buy, which was anything we had. Random, it seems, has a home and that home is found when purchased from a garage sale. I had three flower pots that just happened to be sitting out decorating the property and was asked how much I wanted for them. When told they could have the pots AND the dirt inside of them for a dollar each, they said “sold” as if they were worried they would be outbid. That group filled their SUV with a large portion of our old clutter, along with some things that we never considered selling.

There was a family that wouldn’t stay out of the part of the garage sectioned off to move and had to be asked several times to remain on the “sale” side of the barrier. That’s a strange concept to grasp. I’m fine with you looking over my items over here, but all you seem to be interested in is the stuff I’m not selling. This family didn’t seem to understand when the sale was over either, as they came by again later in the evening to look over our stuff after it was all put away and then the next day when we didn’t have anything out. They were just wandering through our garage. Boundaries people, boundaries.

One man came with his grandson, who was probably eleven–years-old, to act as the man’s translator. I didn’t see everything go down between Wendy and the Haggle family but it was over our carpet steam cleaner, which had all its pieces and worked properly and was priced at the more-than-reasonable dollar price point. Wendy answered all the questions and then when asked, gave the rock bottom price.

“It’s a dollar,” Wendy said, clearly expecting this to be the end of the conversation.

The boy translates and then gets an earful from his grandfather. The boy then give’s his counter offer, “He asks if you would take fifty cents.”

Wendy, who would like to move on to other things, hears the request and shelves anything she was eager to do next. I could see across the driveway that she was mentally rolling up her sleeves to unload on these two jokers for insulting her highly scientific pricing methodology.

“No,” she began, but reined it in, “It’s a dollar.”

That ‘s the moment when the millenniums old tradition of trade known as bartering and haggling met the “it’s a dollar” law of economics. No “supply and demand” or “Summer Holiday Savings!” That dog-pee tinged, pet stain picker-upper is going to cost you one whole damn dollar.

“Are you sure you won’t take fifty cents,” the kid asked, knowing it will bring his grandfather pleasure. This is what they do to bond you see. The grandfather takes the grandson out on the town Friday afternoons to teach him the traditions of the old-country. They really enjoy winding up the people that don’t understand the fun-and-games of the subtle exchange of power that is the dickering over price.

“Now it’s two dollars,” Wendy said, picking up the steam cleaner.

My attention was diverted and I didn’t see the rest of the exchange. At the end, I saw the boy walk down to the car with the steam cleaner and I know Wendy didn’t take less than a dollar for it. But they weren’t done with us.

This time it was my turn. The boy got my attention and brought me just inside our garage. The man looked at me and then, drawing a hand quickly out from behind his back, poked his finger at a 2 X 4 on the wall of my garage and then quickly brought his hand again to the rear of his body where it had been held by his other hand before. Did he just ask me how much I wanted for one of the framing studs of my garage?

It turned out he was interested in a loose twelve-foot 2 X 4 I had standing next to the stud.

“Uh, that’s a dollar,” I said.

“How about…” began the kid.

“Just take it kid,” I said.

“Fifty cents?” continued the kid.

“You can just have it.”

“A quarter?” asked the kid again, slightly confused.

Not so fun getting messed with inside the haggle, is it kid? I just cut the floor out from under you so you didn’t have any place to go. You come to my house, you’re either going to haggle with Princess Immovable-Object or Captain Cave-in. Your need to gratify yourselves with a game of give-and-take will not be satisfied by either, so take my junk out of my garage for me so I don’t have to pay for a run to the dump. That’s right, I win.

Confused, they took the twelve foot 2 X 4 down to their Corolla and slid it through the two open front-seat windows. This manner of transporting that particular piece of wood would almost guarantee a double beheading on their drive home. They really debated it too. In the end, grandpa drove home with the steam cleaner on the front seat and the boy walked home carrying the giant piece of wood.

At the end of the day, a woman and her husband came and bought a few things, then wanted to have a look at our used paint cans. I had far too much paint leftover for each room in the house. I had a half gallon of serious yellow, and a quart sloshing around in a can of definitely blue. There were two different kinds of sand and three different kinds of white along with a very difficult green and super maroon. None filled an entire gallon can of paint and all were purchased by this woman, who either had lots of tiny rooms to paint, or one big room that she planned to drop acid in.

It was no way to run a garage sale, but the day turned out to be very successful. I would love to do it again just to see what people would buy; to see if I could stretch the limits of what I already know about this garage sale culture.

The sale of the house was crazy and I have a few more stories I may or may not share. I will tell you that we’re free of the house, have made it to our home in Kansas and are incredibly happy to be together as a family again, and that’s the Damm Truth.