Sale Results!

First, let me say a huge thank you to everyone who supported us and our adoption by stopping by, telling their friends, and donating items. We absolutely could not have done it without all of you, and we are so grateful for the support! I have more specific thank you's, but I'll get to those in a little bit.

First of all, the total amount made! We made...











over $2,500!! We were so thrilled with that, and it felt like all of our hard work was totally worth it.

We have been sorting, pricing, and organizing the items for over a month now. Poor Chad made roughly 1,238 trips to pick things up, and I spent about that many hours going through everything once it got to our house. We were blessed with donations from friends, our parents, neighbors, church family, and complete and total strangers-definitely what amazed me the most. One couple, whom we had never met before in our lives, gave us all of the leftovers from a sale they had, including a complete darkroom set-up and several pieces of furniture. We made several hundred dollars just from their items.

We received SO many donations. Two weeks before the sale, our 3 car garage was completely full, so we started bringing it all inside the house. Pretty soon, our entryway, dining room, and family room were stuffed to the gills with clothing, furniture, and electronics. I took video...it's pretty funny! Our house totally looked like an episode of "Hoarders!" We started separating out things we thought might just need to go to Goodwill, and stuck all of that on our front porch...I'm sure our neighbors just loved us. Super classy!

Friday we started at 9 am, loading up vehicles to haul it all over to the church shelter. We were so lucky that several wonderful people volunteered to help us move it over. Ben, Mel, Sarah, and Marilyn...THANK YOU!! I think it took 15-16 truck/carloads to get it over there (next time we would rent a truck!). Most of our helpers left, but Sarah stayed the entire day and helped me set up. This was an enormous task, and I could not have done it without her. My mom and dad also helped by entertaining Cooper most of the day. Once Chad's mom took Cooper and got Griffin from the bus (they took them for the whole weekend...thanks Mike and Sue!), my mom headed straight to the sale and helped there. Again, could not have done it without her! We were pretty much set up by 5 pm, which was good timing since we had opened the sale up from 5-8 pm that night.


People started showing up a little before 5, and we stayed very busy right until 8. At the end of the night we had made $750, and I started having hope that maybe the sale would be worth all the time and effort! Chad stayed overnight since everything was sitting outside-poor thing, he did NOT get much sleep!

The next morning we were set to open at 8, and by 8:30 only one or two people had come. I started to get very panicky that the night before had been the majority of people coming, and just as I was about to throw up, people began to arrive in droves! Whew! From 9 until 4, there were almost always 5-10 people shopping at any given moment. This is what things looked like around 10 am...



Chad tried to convince me that setting up the XBox and TV we were trying to sell would prove to everyone that they worked. I'm pretty sure he just wanted to play video games!


We decided to hold a bake sale, and three wonderful friends baked delicious treats for us. Annie, Jen, and Sarah (yes, the same Sarah who also helped set up for the entire day before)...you guys rock!! We made $50-60 just from the bake sale. One of my favorite moments from the whole day was a gruff, burly man who picked 6-7 baked goods (they were $.50 each), handed me a $10 bill, and told me to keep it. I thanked him and asked if he was going to eat them all now (jokingly). He replied, "Oh, I'm diabetic, so I can't, but my aunt's in town so I'm going to bring her some treats." What a nice man! Another lady bought two kids' coats, and told me she was donating them to a coat drive...what a great way to help two causes at once!



By 4 pm we were ready to be done! We began to pack things up and transport them back our house. My wonderful mother (who had been there all day, again!) helped me, and Chad and my awesome dad made trips to the house. We sold at least half of what we started with, but still had tons of trips back. At least this time everything fit back in the garage, and I finally got my house back-yay! We were done at 10 pm, and not a moment too soon...I think Chad and I were ready to fall asleep standing up!

I was just so blown away by everything about the sale. I kept reading in other blogs, when they were describing fundraisers, how God "blessed their socks off," and that is exactly how I felt.