Ensuring your merchandise looks its best largely impacts the success of your garage sale. An organized garage sale is more appealing and makes it easier for shoppers to see what you have for sale. Placing like-items together (categorizing) is a good technique and shows you put forth some effort and thought into your sale. As your sale progresses and more space becomes available you will need to re-group and re-organize your items. This can be done periodically throughout the day.

Boxes - Go to your local grocery store and obtain several various sized cardboard boxes (see To-Do Checklist). They don't cost anything and can usually be found behind the store.

Gather - Take a box with you and canvass your house, place those unwanted items in the box as you move from room to room. When the box is full put it in a central point and pickup another empty box. Move to the next room and repeat the process. Repeat until you have gone through all rooms, closets, drawers, and cupboards. Then move on to the attic, basement, pantry, shed, and don't forget the garage. I know it seems overwhelming, but you can break it down into manageable parts.

Segregate - Separate like items into categories (see Inventory List) and place them in boxes. You may have many categories, (i.e., clothes; collectibles; crafts; furniture; kitchenware; linens; tools; toys; etc.). You may even separate an item by what you will charge for it, such as all .10c or .25c items together.

Relocate - Periodically during your sale, move items that haven't sold to another table or re-locate them on the same table. You will be surprised at how something sells once it is moved. Wait for slack time, when you are not busy, to do this rearranging.

Reorganize - As items sell, and time allows, you should clean up your tables by rearranging and reorganizing your items. You will find you have many empty spaces on your tables, clothes become mixed up and unfolded, people have a tendency to move items from table to table, and categories become intertwined. You will need to rearrange your items to fill those gaps, refold and reorganize clothing, put your like items back together, etc.