Spring is here, and in spring householders hearts turn to thoughts of … getting other people’s stuff on the cheap and feathering the nest a bit. The search queries on my sitemeter stats tell me that more people are looking for garage sales these days. One of the more general and practical queries was “where to find garage sales in DFW?

There are three ways to find garage sales, in DFW and I assume the rest of the country, maybe foreign countries too:

1. Try going on Dallas Craigslist (or Craigslist of your region if you’re from somewhere else) and look under the For Sale column. Click “Garage Sales.” Now you can search for “Fort Worth,” (or Dallas, or Plano, or your zip code, “guitars,” whatever.) Most of the adds do not have zip codes on them, however, so you really will have to read through the whole list if you want to see everything in your area.

2. You can go to the local newspaper (in our case the Star Telegram) and  look under “Merchandise” for Estate Sales or under the main heading “Garage Sales.” The best thing about the Star-Telegram adds is that they are grouped under zip codes. So you don’t have to sift through the entire town if you don’t want to. Estate sales are not grouped, but there’s not that many of them. 

3. Let’s not forget the old standby: you can drive around your neighborhood and look for flourescent garage sale signs. This is actually the way we find about half of the sales we attend every year. But if you haven’t made a list of advertised ones, this technique tends not to work by itself. Perhaps this is because of Garage Sale Momentum, a phenomenon where if one person sees their neighbor getting a sale together, they put out their stuff too, seeing as everyone’s going to be stopping by.

Your task list for before you go to bed tonight, for a good garage sale morning tomorrow:

1. Make list of sales
2. Get the cash you need from the bank
3. Put out your garage saling clothes
4. Secure consent of spouse or other garage saling partner to head out early enough that not everything is gone by the time you get there
5. Set up coffee pot (if desired)
6. Tomorrow, wake up, turn on the pot, get your friend, your coffee, your list, and go, go, go!