To come up with some cute verses to place on your garage sale, simply visit your public library and check out a book on limericks. Adapt the ones that you feel are most humorous, and start making signs. Again, a word of caution before you get too deeply involved: Be sure to check your local ordinance before you start nailing signs to power poles.



By all means, search out and use all the free bulletin boards in your area. It's better, and usually much more profitable to take the time to make up an attention grabbing circular you can post on these bulletin boards, than just to use a scribbled 3 by 5 card announcement.

Pick up some -transfer lettering; go through your newspapers and old magazines for interesting illustrations, graphics and pictures; then with a little bit of imagination and flamboyancy, make up an 8 1/2 by 11 poster announcement of your sale. When you have it pasted up take it to any quick print shop and have them, print up 50 or 100 for you. Your cost for this small print order should be well under ten dollars.

If you make this circular/poster up with versatility and long-time usage in mind, you can use it over and over again simply by pasting on a new date. In case you feel 'left-out' when we talk of 'pasting-up' things, this simply means pasting a piece of paper onto the overall page you're putting together.

Say you have made up your circular with a date of Wednesday, May 1st, and want to change it to read Thursday, July 16th. Rather than do the entire thing over, simply write out a new date with your transfer letters on a separate sheet of paper, cut this out to fit in the space occupied by the old date, and paste the new date over the old date. The artwork master is now up to date; the printer does the rest. Incidentally, this is precisely what is meant in mail order and other dealership offers where they furnish you with the basic advertising/promotional material and advise you to 'paste over' their name/address with your own.

For paste or glue, drop by just about any stationery store and pick up a tube of 'glue stick'. This is a small tube of paste, about the size of a tube of lipstick, generally sold for less than one dollar per tube. The tube glue stick works much better than regular glue or paste, and is not as messy as rubber cement.

Your signs have to be effective, but you have to remember to keep them simple. Don't try to cut corners on your signs. Signs announcing and pointing the way to your garage sale should be placed at each intersection within a one mile radius of your sale location. If it takes 50 signs, then make 50 signs. The important thing is to let people know that you're holding a garage sale.

Signs can be made simply by cutting and using the sides of cardboard boxes, and writing on them with a heavy felt tip marking pen. Make it easy for your signs to be seen, and for people to read what's on them. About all you really need is great big block letters reading 'Garage Sale', with the street address, and an arrow pointing in that direction. Don't think for a minute that people are going to stop and read a lot of 'stuff' you've written on your sign when they are driving by; you just want them to see your sign and proceed in the direction necessary to reach the location of the sale. They'll be moving by your sign too fast to see or read anything else you may have written.

The ads you place, the bulletin board announcements you post, and the signs you put up will bring many people to your garage sale location. A lot of people will drive by slowly and just look, but most will stop to browse around.