Lots of good advice here and it sounds like you have some of this stuff already covered but here's my advice. I go to a lot of garage sales. Signage: I would definitely put your address including number on the signs. Garage Sale - 1234 Elm Street - and an arrow is all you need. Definitely go with a color theme on the sign. A bright color poster helps people follow the signs from far away. Make your signs two sided so that people coming from either direction can read it. Starting time: Whatever starting time you advertise, be out there at least 30 minutes earlier to put your stuff out. By the time the starting time rolls around, everything should be set out. You'll have early birds no matter what but when I arrive at a sale at or after the starting time and they are still putting stuff out, it's annoying. I'm not going to stand around waiting to see what's coming. There are lots of other garage sales waiting for me and the good stuff is going so I don't want to waste time. Oh! and start somewhere between 7 & 8. Any later is too late and you will lose the early customers. Pricing: Price everything. I won't ask for a price. If nothing is priced, I leave. Be willing to haggle but the haggle should be simple. Will you take $1 for this? Yes, no or a counter offer. I don't care what you paid for it, what price it would be if I bought it in a store, how meaningful it is/was to you or any other information EXCEPT if you are willing to take the amount I offered or if you have a counter offer. The money you paid for the stuff you have is GONE. You will never have that money back. Now it's about what you can make today. And that is based on what someone is willing to pay. Price your stuff according to that, not according to what you paid. When people make an offer, depending on the time of day, consider whether you want to have it left over. First thing in the morning you can afford to be more steadfast, depending on the item. As the day wears on, keep in mind that the person making the offer may be the last person to be interested. Do you want to be stuck with the item or have the money? Haggle but don't argue. Once you've gone your lowest, if the customer doesn't want it at that price, that's the end of the conversation. Don't get into an argument even if they try to. It's a turn off to other customers. Smile and walk away. Lemonade: I wouldn't do lemonade, can drinks and bottled water sell much better. Put a bunch of cans in an ice chest and sell them for 75c. They go. Books: don't make me paw through stacked books in a box. Put them spine up so I can easily glance at the titles. Don't bother individually pricing books either. Hardbacks $1 and paperbacks 50 cents. Done. Put up multiple signs with those prices, depending on how many you have. Magazines, 25 cents. That's what they charge at the used book sales at the library so that's what I'd do too. Oh, one more thing, Please take your signs down after the sale is over. Won't make a bit of difference to your bottom line but it's the right thing to do. It's frustrating to follow signs to a sale that doesn't exist. Good luck!!!

adellabedella ~ The house (bird's eye view) is the one to the right of the house with the dark roof. I could tell because one of the last pictures was of a stand alone single-car size garage plus there was a new winter picture added of an enclosed porch. soccergoof ~ Perhaps you could get a rough estimate from a place like Home Depot as to what a small half bath would cost to put in. I wouldn't think it would be prohibitive price-wise. You could always think about renting furniture for staging but you might need to look into a professional stager to have it done right. I would be more excited to have an extra half-bath since that would make your home stand out from the competition. Not sure if it all might cost the same as a professional stager/furniture. If you put the half-bath off the laundry room area I wouldn't think the cost to plug into the pipes would be too terribly high. Good luck and let us know what you decide. If you were able to get in the high $170's or low $180's wouldn't that be worth it to you? You stated that you bought the house for $168K. Did you put money down on the house so that you could pull the money out to start building your new home? Robyn

1) Would you get mad if your house was for sale and people in the neighborhood parked their car in your driveway? I would not get mad but I might ask/let the seller know. 2) There are some houses for sale on my street and no one lives in them. But there is always the same car parked in the driveway. What? The same car at all of the houses, or each house has a different car?? Is there a parking issue in your n'hood??? 3) When i brought my house 5 years ago, a guy across the street had his truck in my driveway. I closed on a friday and when i went to move in saturday morning i had to park behind his truck. Then he came and introduced himself and asked me to move my car so he could get his truck. This one has me on the fence. I might or might not have moved my car to accommodate him, depends on so many things. 4) Any opinions on this? No opinion really, just scratching my head over it. LOL Where is this????

Thanks to everyone who commented. Here is the latest. I read the state sales tax rules and the actual laws they are based on. (I think my head will stop spinning in a week or two.) Then I called the tax folks in Nashville and asked what was up. It boils down to this. Real property is not subject to sales tax, but personal property is. Ignoring Tennessee's 10,001 politically motivated personal property tax exemptions, contractor's who build or repair real property are not required to collect retail sales tax on their labor or the finished work, but they are required to pay sales tax on the materials they use. This means that a business supplying cabinets to a builder for a builder to install has to charge the builder sales tax for the cabinets, since the cabinets are material to the builder. However, if the cabinet business installs the cabinets, the installation comes under the real property definition, and there is no retail sales tax due. But the cabinet business must pay tax on what they paid for the cabinets, if they bought them, or the materials, if they built them. So, it looks like the cabinet business that said we would "only" have to pay 3.5% if they installed them was planning to charge us for the tax they are supposed to pay on the wholesale price of the cabinets. At least this has helped validate the close to 200% mark up on cabinets that others been posted about on GW before. We are now talking to a custom cabinet maker.