One of my sons lives in Ponte Vedra. He just bought a new home there and had to dispose of a lot of items from his old home. He is renting it until the market improves. He has found a good tenant who wants to move in right away and so he has to get rid of the left over household goods he did not take with him. My wife and I offered to hold a garage sale at the old home.
We are very familiar with Palm Coast garage sales. We have neighbors who go regularly as a form of entertainment. We have bought things from Comin Around Again (http://CominAroundAgain.com) and our friend runs At Your Service, another professional garage sale and estate sale organization here in town. Garage Sales are very popular here. Early Birds arrive in droves and cars fill the street around the sale houses.
Not so in Ponte Vedra. Different demographics. Palm Coasters are looking for bargains. Ponte Vedrans are mostly just nosy neighbors checking out other neighbors to better keep up with the Joneses-or at least bad mouth them and their poor taste. And no Early Birds. The rush didn’t come until after 10:00am.
But the Ponte Vedra address did attract some bargain hunters and the tenants themselves decided to purchase a number of things. We sold two oriental rugs, an antique vanity with a mirror, an antique roll top desk, a chest of drawers, a pool side set of wicker chairs and small tables, and a lot of geegaws and small things. This Thursday we are renting a trailer, going back to Ponte Vedra, and hauling the rest of the stuff home here to Palm Coast- where bargains are appreciated and garage sales tours have replaced model home tours as a fun way to spend a couple of hours.
Barb and I don’t like to haul stuff in and out of our garage. And the garage is full to the brim. And you can never tell if it will rain on your Garage Sale date and then you can’t use your driveway. But we want to downsize for when we get feeble and we have lots of things we want to dispose of. So I am creating www.PalmCoastGarageSales.com to sell my son’s stuff and some of my own.
We will attack the garage like this: We will make three piles…”Throw this crap out” “Try to Sell This Stuff” and “Give this to Goodwill”. With some luck we will have room in the garage for at least one car by spring.
My online-garage-sale thing is unique. Palm Coast does not have a CraigsList. We have to list on Daytona’s or St. Augustine’s. Sell on EBay? I just bought something from an EBay auction. What a pain in the ass. Staring at the deadline time and frantically punching in higher “maximum bids”-I got my thing at somewhat of a discount, but did not like the process. About a year ago I used the “Buy Now” feature of EBay and wound up owning two Dyson sweepers by mistake. And selling things? And EBay is putting the squeeze on the little guy and has made it much more restrictive and complicated to sell one or two items. They want storefronts with lots of items and five star ratings.
So I am doing an internet thing. I am developing my website using lots of videos on it to show items. Lots of pictures. And I have a unit at Champion Self Storage I call my “Inspection Station” where-if you see something you like on the website-you can arrange to see it in person at the Inspection Station. Like at a garage-based Garage Sale, you make me an offer using email and I either accept your offer or call you a nasty name. It should be fun.
Many of us Senior Citizens who go to Garage Sales break out in a rash when someone asks us if we have email or use a computer. But more and more of us Oldies are admitting computers are like indoor plumbing. You can’t really defend why you won’t use one. Well, you can and do, but I think you know you are sounding ridiculous.
I am offering www.PalmCoastGarageSale.com as a vehicle for other Palm Coasters to sell their stuff and give the proceeds to charity and I am also selling space on it real cheap-free to some-in order to get started with a good inventory so the site will be a good place to go and browse around and look at things… without the need to get up early in the morning and then hassle with where to park your car.
Got something you would like me to sell for you? Drop me a comment. Talk To Ted !
