GARAGE SALE ARTICLES

Do the hard yards and clean up big time

Yep, yard selling isn’t all beer and skittles. There’s lots of cleaning and maintenance to be done even before you get to yard sale square one!

But if you think of your yard sale as a great way to clean up, both physically and financially, it will ease the burden of the jobs that need doing.

Of course you’ll need to make sure your yard is clean, tidy and above all safe. It’s probably best to do the cleaning and maintenance yourself - paying someone else to do it will just eat into your profits.

Fortunately, you don’t have to clean up all alone - get the kids to pitch in.

You might consider offering them a share of the profits as an incentive - not only for helping you keep the yard tidy, but for bringing any money-making ideas to your attention. Remember, children can be very creative, and giving them a stake in your sale will teach them valuable lessons they can apply throughout their lives.

Throughout the big day of the yard sale, place the kids on a roving commission to ‘clean as they go’. This will ensure there’s less of a mess to clean at the end of the day.

Take half an hour out by all means to relax and regroup, but resist the temptation to leave the tidying till the next day, week or month (!)

Take a deep breath and get stuck into the mess.

Remember, your yard sale has already cleared your home of all the old stuff you no longer need. Now is the time to press home the advantage and clean up big time!

Fear not, yard seller, outdoors areas can handle a lot of ‘broad-brush’ cleaning, and so are never as difficult to tidy as they seem at the outset.