Garage sale success in 10 easy steps

Updated

I'm sitting in an old wicker chair (make me an offer) outside my garage on Chicago's North Side. It's not even 12:30 p.m. on this gorgeous Saturday and we've had a steady stream of customers parading through our alley all day for our garage sale. And they're buying all sorts of castoff and leftover items we no longer need, from our vacuum cleaner to old movies I accrued as a newspaper DVD columnist. We're still waiting to see if our incomplete set of three Toyota hubcaps will sell.

Wishful thinking, perhaps. Still we've netted more than $150 so far, and even my son and daughter have done well with their combined cookie and lemonade stand. All of this makes me think: Is there a formula for garage sale success? While certain crucial factors cannot be controlled -- the weather, most importantly -- I've identified ten key ingredients that, when combined, spell garage sale success like the kind we're having on this spring Saturday.

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