Jacksonville Yard Sale!

A few weeks ago we decided to do another yard sale here in Jacksonville. We didn't personally have a lot of stuff to sell, but we were overwhelmed by the blessing of our community! Sixteen families contributed, so let me start with a huge heartfelt THANK YOU to these rockstars: The Borders, Boyles, Staples, Scoggins, McGees, the {future} Madrids, Youngs/Peevys, Cardens, Browns, Parrises, Gossetts, Reaves, Monroes, Grandma Scoggins, our neighbors Amy and Brian, and Emily Barry. THANK YOU all for being so generous to us!

Just to give you an idea of how much stuff we were given, here is our garage the day before (and there were about eight boxes on the porch too!).

When we decided to do the yard sale on Saturday, February 11th, we were looking at a temperature of about 60 degrees here in Alabama. I was pumped that we would be given the blessing of good weather, so we went ahead and put an ad in the paper ($21 for three days!), bought our permit ($3 for good for 5 days) made a facebook event, and told everyone about our yard sale. As the ten-day forecast became closer and closer, the temperature slowly dropped and we were facing a 35 degree high for Saturday!

Will & I made a game-time decision on Friday morning of the 10th, and went ahead and started the yard sale that day. We put the signs out, updated our craigslist ad, and suddenly people were at our door! Our ad/ the signs said that it would start at 1pm, but there was a woman on our porch at 10:30!! We decided to go ahead and set everything out, and before you know it there were tons of people there!

Day 1's total: $610!!!

Friday night we went to bed early and prepared to wake up EARLY to begin Day 2 of yard-saling!

We woke up and the temperature had dramatically droped overnight! Sweet friends of ours, Prudence, Les and Micah, came over at 5 am, so I fixed them breakfast and we prepared to brave the cold and set the yard back up. Thankfully, everything was pretty organized from yesterday.

 

We put everything out on the yard by 5:30 and went inside to enjoy our breakfast and coffee, when suddenly we heard rain! We ran outside and covered up the books, thinking that the rain would soon pass over. The rain got a little heavier so we decided to bring EVERYTHING onto the porch or garage. As soon as we decided this it started SNOWING! At about 6:30, with snow falling and all, we had customers!

All the cars from our brave customers!

Although the snow stopped pretty soon after it started, the temperature continued to drop during the day. There was a freezing wind and we were all so cold! We decided to set up a little coffee stand (for free) for our customers!

We figured out that the yard was not ideal for shopping so we tried to set everything up in our garage as best we could- the walls tended to keep the wind out! I wasn't all that excited about having people in the garage, because not everything in there was for sale, but I had to get over it!!

By mid-morning, the reinforcements came! And by reinforcements, I mean three of our awesome college students who not only came to help but got us SO organized inside!

We had to literally close the garage door to keep shoppers out when it was time to wrap up for the day. I'm sure we could have kept going, but by the end of the day people were getting items for almost nothing because they were wanting to talk us down so low, and we were too cold to argue!

Our Day 2 total: $438!!

Which puts our Jacksonville yard sale total to $1,038!!!!

We could NOT have done this without our precious friends who donated items and those who came out to serve us! We thought about doing one more yard sale with all that we have left over, but we decided to just pass the items on to our church-wide yard sale to benefit the annual Honduras mission trip (the yard sale will occur while we are in Ethiopia).

Our neighbor came over on Saturday and she said to me, "If people are willing to come out here and shop in the snow, then I know God is going to provide a way for your baby to come home." What a testimony! It is so true that God worked above and beyond what would be reasonable for a freezing, last-minute yard sale. The fact that we made any money at all on Saturday blows my mind! Praise God!