Garage Sales: Putting the FUN back in Fundraiser.

If you haven't read our Garage Sale preview post from a week ago, here’s the 10 step run down on our fundraiser. (1) Any Blessing Pot would be better with more money. More money = More blessings for others. (2) We had an idea how to add money to the pot. (3) People in our culture have lots of “stuff” they no longer want or need. (4) We contacted those people. (5) We picked up and removed the donations from these peoples homes (here we found some top notch stuff) (6) We planned and advertised a garage sale. (7) We had a garage sale. (8) POWER HOUR. (9) We dropped of the remaining donations left over from the sale at Community Care (10) The Blessing Pot is now better off simple because it has more money. How much better you may ask? Keep reading.

Bright and early Saturday morning (we are talking 05:45 early) Adam and I climbed my roof and mounted a camera to record the days event at our garage sale. With a garage and basement full of donated items, the first customers were already milling around the end of my driveway to have first pickins’ as we hastily unpacked our boxes at 06:00 on the dot. (Good omen)

By 07:00 everything was unpacked, sorted by category onto different tables, and our sale was bumpin! With our fanny packs clipped tight and sun visors in place, it was time to sell some treasures.

Here is where we give a special mention to Josh WIillms and his amazing selling skills. This guy could sell you a bag of dirt and make you feel great about it. My favorite Willms line of the day was fed to a nice gentleman who was interested in buying this toy rocking horse. Josh places his hand firmly on the toy, leaned in close and said “…And you wanna know the best feature on this here horse? She doesn’t poop and ya don’t gotta feed it!” The horse sold right then and there.

We are super thankful for the incredible help from our friends Julia, Lindsay, Ryan, Mackenzie, Caleb, my brother Mike and of course Grandma Koop. Toss in some perfect weather, and a great location and you got yourself one heck of a G-Sale.

There must have seen at least 600 people through our yard between 07:00 and 14:00. The lawn was packed with happy bargain shoppers all day and we made tons of sales. However, around 14:30 we started to see a decline foot traffic and also a decline in the average quality of the treasures. This was when the savvy Garage salesman realized that everything had to go, or else he'd be left with a pile of crap.. erm "useful items" on tables in his driveway. And nobody likes being left with a pile of "useful items", tables or not.

So naturally, as an astute sales crew we initiated PowerHour© Everything in the yard was now a buck. That is right. 1. Buck. Charles must have sold two truck loads of stuff in the last hour. Adam said it best as he announced to a small crowd “We don’t want this stuff… But you do!” I sold a woman a wooden table for 1 dollar- Awesome transaction.

So if you haven’t caught the drift by now, the day was an astounding success. If I had to put a dollar value on the success of the day, I would say it was a one thousand five hundred dollar success of a day.

Sorry, I don’t know if you heard me. I said a ONE THOUSAND FIVE HUNDRED DOLLAR day.

THAT'S WHA I'M TALKIN' BOUTT!

We are so thankful for everyone that donated items so that we could have more money to buy things for the folks in need that we meet along the way. The Blessing Pot is now quite a bit happier, and we are too. Muskoka, here we come!


Cheers, The Boys

p.s. Video to come. just waiting to be re-united with Adam and his iPhone footage. We'll hit you with the link when it's done.

written by: JG