Hi everyone, I know it's been a few weeks since our HUGE garage sale! I just wanted to give you all an update. The garage sale was an amazing success and such a blessing. Thank you everyone who donated things and for all of the prayers that were coming our way!
We had so much stuff at to sell at the garage sale that it was a little bit overwhelming! My parents 3 car garage was completely filled with stuff, plus their living room and dining room were full of boxes and piles of things! Thursday night we brought another full truck and van load down, which didn't even get unloaded until we were setting up the next morning because there was no place to put it all! What generosity from everyone (friends, family, Expedia people and the Cedar Park Northshore youth group)! Friday morning we started bright and early just trying to organize all of the stuff. We had tarps on the lawn for clothes and lots of borrowed folding tables for other things. It took us until 5:00 that evening before we felt that we had most of the stuff out and organized. The nice thing about that too, is that there was a steady string of people all day long shopping so we sold quite a bit of stuff that first day, without even trying! Then we drug everything back into the house and garage as they were so Saturday morning we could just drag them back out and it made set up a breeze the next day! We were so busy all day Saturday and sold a huge portion of our stuff! I was the "cash lady" and there was a line of people waiting to buy things! The weather was nice and it was BUSY BUSY BUSY!!! What a blessing all around. Then Sunday we pulled the stuff out again and started deciding what we wanted to donate or keep (somethings were not donate worthy so we will try selling them via other avenues). We also had a steady stream of people buying stuff all day and by the end of it a majority of the stuff was gone! There was just a small pile left to be donated by the end of the day!
By the end of the garage sale on Sunday we had made over $2000!!! That is amazing! We were hoping for half that amount of money, so felt so blessed to be able to double our goal! We also didn't sell few of the things (all of the collectors porcelain dolls and coach purses we had donated) at the garage sale so we have been putting them on Craig's List and eBay the past two weeks and have made almost $300 so far doing that!! Another huge blessing. We still have more dolls to sell so if anyone is or knows any doll collectors, send them our way! Ryan also spent the month leading up to the garage sale making wooden signs out of re-purposed wood (from our fence in the back yard that is falling down). These were not popular items at the garage sale, but we are hoping there might be another market to sell those in as well. We are still looking into that though. So all in all, we can probably make a little bit more from the "garage sale"!
The money we raised from the garage sale and after went directly to our first agency fee that we had to submit before starting the home study. This sale covered about 2/3 of the amount which was such a huge huge blessing. It was nice to not have our adoption savings have to be eaten up so quickly! And we have enough in there right now to cover the next agency fee which is due when we have completed our home study.
Speaking of home study, we are just plugging away at it. We try to work on it every night (or every other night, depending on how tired we are). It is A LOT of writing. Mostly we write about our lives and our upbringings. But there are also questions about what we think we would do in certain situations. It's not hard writing, just time consuming and makes you think. We are really excited to be making progress everyday! We just submitted our first batch of paperwork/writings to our social worker this week which felt so good to get it out for her to be going over. I am hoping to be able to get another batch off to her at the end of this week!
Keep praying for perseverance for us to get this completed quickly. It's a daunting task, but we need to just keep plugging away at it! Thank you everyone for all of your support and prayers!
