garage sale mapWelcome, readers brought in by one of my most popular search terms! If you like this article, you might also like Coupons vs. Generics: Contact Solution, Ten (Other) Ways to Make Your College Education Pay Dividends, or my Spendthrift Sunday series.

Garage sales, yard sales, rummage sales, tag sales, estate sales - whatever they’re called, my husband and I love them. When we lived in Watertown we used to hit all the sales within walking distance. Our set of pilsener glasses came from a rummage sale ($2), as did our queen-sized mattress ($40, and the seller helped us carry it up the hill to our apartment) and a few rare board games (Tales of the Arabian Nights for 50 cents). Altogether, it was a thrifty, healthy way for us to spend couple time together and get out some of the shopping urges.

Alas, Lunenburg is not so pedestrian-friendly, and that, combined with the price of gas, has kept us away from the garage sale finds this year. Recently, however, I was inspired by “Garage sales hunts: using the net to make your hunt more effective” on The Dollar Stretcher, and decided to plan my own gas- and time-saving garage sale route for this weekend. In the process I discovered a wealth of web resources for planning a garage sale hunt.

Finding sales. There are several methods to find sales near you. The method I used is similar to Amy’s - I looked up my local paper, the Fitchburg Sentinel & Enterprise, with a Google Search. As Amy points out in her DS article, even if you don’t subscribe to the local paper…they happily list their ads online for free access. Other sale-finding tools you might consider:

  • Craigslist: I haven’t had as much luck with this resource as Amy had, but I live in a pretty rural area.
  • E-Podunk can help you find local resources such as newspapers, should your newspaper not be listed so prominently in search engines.
  • Google Notebook allows you to copy and paste any ads you might find into an online “notebook.” There’s even a Firefox plugin for it!
  • Numerous garage sale search sites exist, though they are only as useful as the number of ads posted to them. Yard Sale Search has a decent number of listings, but its ZIP code search only turns up listings exactly in your ZIP code, so you have to use the more unwieldy search by state mechanism. Garage Sales Near U, Garage Sale Daily , and Garage Sale Search have friendlier interfaces, with a functional ZIP search, but their listings seem very limited. Yard-Sale-Search.com is a website local to Leominster, MA - near where I live! - but includes sales from across the country in one spreedsheet format. This works for the small number of sales it lists, but may be more difficult as the site grows in popularity.

Garage Sale Nation, GoYarding.com, and gsalr.com add functionality beyond just a search engine - they also plot your search results on a Google Map.  Since this is basically what we’re about to do in step two, I approve. Each one has its own features and quirks.

Garage Sale Nation has a good number of listings and allows you to search by partial ZIPs, but I have gone to sales listed here and found nothing but empty lawn - which makes me think that out-of-date listings are sometimes not removed promptly.

I haven’t used GoYarding.com or gsalr.com yet personally, but they have similar functionality, and the added bonus that they collects yard sale data from Craig’s List (GoYarding, gsalr) and local newspapers (GoYarding only)  to populate their maps. This expands the range of sales covered exponentially, and I’m only a little envious that they implemented the idea first :) Gsalr even adds in a trip planner, similar to what I’m about to do below.

Conclusion: all of these sites work in very different ways, so if you want the most comprehensive map, you’ll need to go on to step two.

Making your map. Go to Google Maps. Go to the “My Maps” tab (you need to have a free Google account and be logged in to do this). You can now do a map search for different sale address and add a marker to the map to indicate where it is. You will also probably want to put your home address on here. I made this garage sale map in a matter of 10 minutes. Here are some tips for customizing your map like mine:

  • Use different symbols. I used a “pin” symbol to indicate priority sales. I used colors to differentiate the time the sale starts - important if you want to get the best stuff! Finally, I used the little “house” symbol to indicate where I live (approximately).
  • Make a key for your map. Do this under “Edit title/settings.” Then you can say, as I did, that the 8 AM sales are the ones with purple balloons
  • Make you map public or unlisted. Also under “Edit title/settings,” this will allow you to set your map privacy options.
  • Make notes on each location. I posted the sale listing into the notes section, as well as directions in some cases. This is important when deciding what sales to hit - if it says “lots of baby clothes!” I’ll likely miss it; whereas my one “priority” pin is a sale with a lawnmower and a snowblower, both of which we need.

Plot out your actual route. Start by deciding what sale you want to go to first. You may do this based on what sales are earliest, or what ones you most want to hit. I decided I didn’t want to get up before 7AM to hit the first sale, but that I really did want to hit the red pin sale right as it opened at 8:30 AM. Select that symbol on the map, and choose “Get Directions to Here.” This will bring up the “search results” tab, with direction to your location. You can then add locations in the order you want to visit them. I decided, for example, to skip out on the sale on Glenwood Drive in Leominster, because it’s just too far off the circular route I planned:

map.png

In total, the route is 28 miles, which is a little less than one gallon of gas in the Subaru - around $2.80 here. I can handle that amount for a morning of thrifty fun with my husband.

Get out the map. The one downfall I have found to this system is that when you print out your custom map, all the pins and notes are not printed with it - so I have to print out my directions and my notes and my map separately. But! If you have a mobile phone with a data service, or a PDA with wireless service, you can save the KML file and view it in Google Maps for Mobile. If anyone has tried this, let me know how it works - I, alas, have none of these resources.

… and go! Clean out your car before you go - and opt for the vehicle that is most gas efficient while still having enough space to carry home your stuff. Bring lots of water and snacks, so you don’t have to stop for food. Bring some cash (of course); preferably small bills, but not enough so that you can go too hog-wild. If there’s a pricier item you want, this method will give you time to really consider your purchase while you’re hitting the ATM or writing a check. Haggle, but don’t be rude.

Happy garage sale-ing!

Updated 8/13/07 with information on Yard-Sale-Search.com.
Updated 10/08/08 with updates on sale search sites, and new header at the top.

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