For any of you who watch Storage Wars, I am sure you thought about buying a storage unit at auction. I know I have. I've seen almost every episode. YUUUPPPP I have. I am a fan of treasures, and I like watching them dig through the stuff.
My family has been planning a yard sale for the end of October and I thought now is as good of time as any to try it out. The yard sale will give me an outlet to offload the small stuff in the unit as well as some of the big ones.
Since I live in Arizona and it is hot even in October, I didn't want to go standing around trying to bid on lockers. I did some searching around for online auctions. I found storagetreasures.com, storagebattles.com and lockerfox.com. After looking through all the lockers for auctions, I found the one I wanted.
It had a few days left on it so I put a bid in for half my max to test out the other bidders. Finally during the last 20 seconds of the auction, I put in my max and won the locker for $10 less than max bid. YAY!!
So now that I won, what happens next? I had to go to the storage facility and pay the winning bid in cash, plus a $100 refundable cleaning deposit. The facility manager took me to my locker and opened it up. There it was a 10x10 unit of treasure!
It took 3 truck loads and a trailer full to empty it all out. You have 48 hours to empty the unit after a win. Some facilities are gracious and give you extra time. The facility I bought from said I could have a couple extra days but I didn't want to inconvenience them.
So the fun part and the worst part is sorting. It took me 5 days to sort, clean and price everything for the yard sale. It was exhausting.
I didn't find anything in my unit that was going to make me rich or any particular item that would recoup the cost of the unit. I did find an espresso machine that was $300 when it was new. That is going to take a particular buyer to sell to. I found a $500 piece of personal use medical equipment but again, particular buyer but more than likely will end up donating to a place that helps those who can't afford this type of machine. I also found a 1987 dining table and chairs. In amazing shape really but the market for that is slim to none. There was also a rear projection TV that I made $50 on within a day.
Thankfully we are having the yard sale because those little things add up to big money. My brother came by a couple times and bought stuff. Between my brother and the sale of the TV I have made half my money back.
Yard Sale time has rolled around and it took days of prep to get ready. I had 20 tables worth of items, including my personal stuff. Exhausting work but it is the experience that has made this worth it. When I was tagging all these items I wrote them down. This adds a lot of time to the process but I like to have an idea of how much I have at sticker price. Once I have that total I cut it in half and that is my goal for the sale. So with my goal set it was time to sell.
Day 1 of the yard sale was a Friday. Friday's usually bring a lot of dealers but I didn't see many this time. It did get crazy busy. There was three of us working the sale and that almost wasn't enough. There was a point where we had a line of people waiting to pay. I sold about half of my stuff from 7:00am-2:00pm. Once the day was over I totaled up my earning which I tracked separate from my other items and made 2.5 times my original investment in the locker. Which is pretty awesome when you think about it. I didn't meet my goal on day 1 but there is always day 2.
Day 2 was slower but still productive. We had a good turn out. The best part is the neighbors come by to chat. Yard sales are a great way to get to know your neighbors. I was ready to shut down by 1:00pm the heat was getting to me but people continued to show up until 2:30. I didn't make as much on day 2 but sold about half of what was left. I still have enough stuff left to open up for our community sale in 2 weeks. Once the day was done, I totaled up my money and made 3.7 times my original investment.
Now that it is done, would I do it again? Yes. In fact I am already looking for another unit.
