HUGE Garage Sale Success!

There are few things I despise more than garage sales. I've had a few in my time, but only a few. When it came time to consider fundraising efforts to bring Anya home one of the first things I said to God was "Please don't make me have a garage sale!". Well, He didn't...instead my wonderful friend Nicki offered to have it for me! I said "YES!" very fast before she came to her senses and changed her mind ;). We decided to do a bake sale at the same time. We also decided that we would not be pricing anything. When people came we would tell them about Anya (we also had a big poster with her picture on it with her story) and then tell them that they could take what they wanted and just leave a donation that they felt was worth what they wanted to pay for it. The hours of our sale were Friday 4-8 and Saturday 7-1.

Our goal was to raise $1500. That would pay for the remainder of our homestudy (we are required to pay up front for all of our post placement reports too which threw us off a bit) and our money needed to mail our I800A for immigration. It was a huge amount of money. I posted on our goal on Facebook. I almost didn't post it because I thought it might be a bummer if I had to post later and explain that we only made 1/2 of that or less. Oh ye of little faith....

On Thursday evening we worked hard getting the garage sale set up. Our plan was that I would come back about noon on Friday and we would work all afternoon until the garage sale opened at 4. At around 8 am Nicki started putting out signs and next thing she knows people are in her driveway! She was not near ready to open and she told them that but she did open up and let them come in. People were rummaging through boxes while she was trying to organize. Then more, and more, and more people came. She had a non stop flow of people until we got to her house around 12:30! By 2 we had raised $600 and the sale wasn't even supposed to open for 2 hours! I started to become concerned that we were going to run out of stuff and next thing I know there are people who had been by earlier to buy something coming BACK to drop off donations!!!! I could not believe it! By the end of the evening we had raised over $1000 and had PLENTY of stuff for Saturday!

We had another great day on Saturday and in the end we raised right around $1700! I am still in shock. Now it's time to start thinking about the $5500 we will need when it is time to mail our dossier!