It sounds like you found some great stuff! I love Johnson Brothers china.

Our van has a trailer hitch, and with a V-8 towing a trailler should not be a problem should we decide to purchase a trailer at a later date. A box truck would be great, but I don't think our neighbors would like seeing a 26-ft. box truck always parked in our driveway. They already don't like us having the allowed number of garage sales a year.

We did not buy a van just for this, but for anything we might want to haul. We also considered a truck, but the van is a Ford E250 super duty and has a lot of cargo space. We can also drive home with a load and lock the van then unload it the next morning if we want. No worries about rain, snow, or anything blowing out of a truck bed on the highway.

We can easily haul stuff to the flea market, put it in the van at the end of the day and not have to unload if it is a Saturday and Sunday outdoor flea market. The next morning just drive back and pull everything out and set it up.

We got a good deal on the van, it is a 2005 model.

We went to our first auction yesterday and some idiot burned a hole in the sleeve of my jacket when he got too close to me with his cigarette. I don't smoke myself. The jacket was less than two months old. A birthday gift from my husband. Columbia fleece. At least half of the 60 or so people at this auction were smoking. Two of them were carrying small dogs. Is this normal for people to bring their pets to auctions?

We did not bid on any units at the auction. A little over half of the tenants had paid their bill, so only about 28 units. Many with nothing but trash and dirty clothes, it looked like anything of value had been removed. We saw one 10x10 that was packed full, and the stuff was of just average quality, I might have bought it for $400 or so, but it went for $1800. A half full unit with clothes, baby stuff and particle board furniture and a scary mattress sold for $800. I kept thinking about how much $800 would buy at garage sales, and not have to haul so much to the dump. We will continue to go to the auctions. There were about 60 people there, and I think that was part of the problem.

The good news is we bought a cargo van today. Pretty excited about that. Will make going to the flea market much easier. The Sunday only flea market is also only once a month. It is indoors, and has a couple of hundred vendors. They are not open in July and August, because the building is not air-conditioned. I did learn of another outdoor market held every weekend in the warmer months where booths are only $10. Will be checking that out for sure, since we can only have two garage sales a year.

I am excited to be attending my first storage auction tomorrow. When the notice was posted in the paper, there were 61 units (between seven locations, one storage company). I am expecting that about half of the owners will have paid before the auction, but with this being right after Christmas, maybe people are too strapped for cash to pay their delinquent storage locker rent.

I may just observe, but I am prepared with my cash and padlocks if there are units I really want. This is something I have wanted to do long before the TV shows created all this storage auction mania. I have been a serious garage saler and occasional flea market vendor for the past 20 years.

In the city of 300,000 where I live, there is a limit on how many garage sales you can have in a year. They are limited to three days each, and have to have at least six months between sales. We have one sale in late March or the first weekend in April, then another in late September or the first weekend in October. Thursday is a GREAT day for sales here. We run ours Thursday-Saturday.

We have a neighbor who would turn us in without hesitation if we tried to have the sales less than six months apart. I have some professionally made signs that I reuse. I do not put the date on the signs, just GARAGE SALE, the address, and TODAY 8am-3pm. I ordered these from vistaprint.com and they work great! Weatherproof and very sturdy. We advertise on craigslist and spring for an ad in the local paper. I have tried skipping the newspaper ad to save the $33, but I really notice an increase in traffic when we place an ad.