Everything must go!

Well, that was fun. Pam's mum has sold her house (after 48 years there), is moving out next Friday to a snazzy new townhouse, and the property has to be bare, inside and out, by then. So the only solution was a classic 'Everything must go' garage sale, including lots and lots and lots of potted plants, as Pam's mum, Val, is quite a green thumb, who I have blogged about before, here. Here's a few snaps from the big day.

We advertised in the local paper and online, put up signs nearby on telegraph poles, but nothing beats Nanna's hand-made sign which we nailed to the lovely old paperbark tree (a Melaleuca) outside her house. The bark itself is about two inches thick in places, and so the nails never touched real wood, but the sign has held onto the dense bark nevertheless.

I was in charge of the plant sale, and so I organised the pots into lines of $1 pots, $2 pots and $5 pots. So everything there was a very good bargain. Anything we can't sell goes into a skip – a terrible fate – so our aim was less to make money and more to see the pots off to new homes.

Just $5 - that's craaaaaazzzzy!

Dracaenas for just $1 – that's craaaaaazzzzy!

Told you Nanna has green thumbs.

Succulents a specialty.

These went fast.

Happy customer Liza even brought her own trolley.

At $10 for the pair, these pots (not the weeds in them) didn't even last till the official opening time of 9am.

And how can you have a proper garage sale without a garage? Val's collection of bric-a-brac is extensive, to put it mildly, and the action was brisk early on, as everything was priced to sell. The gnomes were gone before 9.30. No-one wanted the Wedgwood plate, though, and the Royal Worcester egg coddler, at $10, is still there. Books gone, magazine stacks dwindled rapidly at 10c a pop. And retail mathematics was the order of the day, so if people bought six items at $2 a pop, it's 6 x 2 = 10. Works for me.

Val has lots of great friends and they all showed up to help out during the day. Some brought cakes, another a barbecued chicken and bread rolls which, with some avocado and a tomato or two, turned into a very nice lunch. It was tea and coffee all morning but by late lunch the champagne came out with a loud Pop! and the garage sale slowly turned into a verandah party by late afternoon. The good news is that we sold a big proportion of what we started with, and lots of potted plants are going to loving homes somewhere in the local area. I can sleep easy tonight!