The Summer trip to Michigan to visit Family & Friends

Finally Headed out on the big trip for June and July. Waited at home for an extra day for a remodel job that didn't pan out and for our tax license to come in the mail,(they told us it would be there by the first of the week and of course it came at the end of the week in the mail the day after we left) so now we are in the process of having it faxed. You know getting our schedule and being somewhere so someone from home can send it out while we are there.

It's Friday afternoon (waiting for the mail man who was of course running behind this day) and the first place we went was to the 100 mile sale on route 52 in TN, (starting from Lafayette TN and stretching100 mile west) very unique, although similar to the 127 yard sale (much more well known) except on route 52. In front of public land only you can pull off the road and set up at no cost and sell what you brought. There are a few local land and business owners that will let you set up on there property for a fee but you need to show up early probably Thursday afternoon.

It was a little noisy staying the night (imagine being broken down on the side of the road and trying to sleep there while waiting to be rescued and you get the picture) the next part I don't recommend, (but you do what you have to) is to put everything back in the trailer and drive 3 hours to the next flea market for Sunday and sleep in there parking lot until the venders get you up (at 6am)(5am for us because of the time change) find a spot and set up again. Whew are we tired thank goodness when Monday rolled around we could sleep in.

The next process is to find stuff on the road to buy and r- sell, we were going to buy a pallet but our license didn't come in time so we will probably do that on the way back through in August because of location of the warehouse.

First we found a storage unit sale and only 2 of the 8 units were worth buying and one of those was a 10X25 unit we couldn't have fit in our 7X14 trailer even if it was empty and the other was close to the same size with some nice newer tools and a few things we could have sold but this unit also included a safe the size of a Volkswagen. (no way to move it not sure what we would have done with it).

The next step was to find a local auction house when we got there we found it was owned by one of the people we were bidding against at the storage unit auction the day before. He had some very nice antique furniture but that wasn't the type of stuff we were looking for so we moved on.

Next we are boon-docking in a wal*mart parking lot, it is way more fun and a lot less scary than you would ever think it was. Thank goodness for the curtains you can pull. P.S. Didn't stop for gas before we parked and the generator won't run when the fuel tank is under a ¼. No electricity and no A/C. (looking up the cost to convert the generator to pro pain cheaper to fill and even with boon-docking, having the fridge on and showering and doing dishes the pro pain tank has lasted a lot longer than expected. Plus pro pain burns cleaner than gasoline & with the rig only getting 10 MPG at the best the thoughts of anything taking fuel from the tank makes me have a twitch. LOL!!

We found storage unit auctions close both Wednesday ans Thursday, all the credit goes to Cheri she is very diligent searching for this stuff so we will see what we get.

We went to Wednesdays auction and there was some good stuff (only 2 units) but we were outbid.

We moved on to the next storage unit auction site and found another wal*mart to stay at. we spent the rest of the day catching up on things that needed to be done. The first storage unit auction starts at 9:30 Thursday am.

The goal for now is to set up at Traders World flea market in Oh next the the big statue of Jesus with his arms outstretch near I75 between Cincinnati and Dayton OH for Memorial Weekend.

First real trip doing re-sale to pay for it.

We went to Ohio from TN to do some geniology research, we stopped at a local auction house and bought a few things to re-sell, then on the way back stopped at flea land in bowling green KY.



While we were out we boondocked at a few different Wal-Marts wich was not only fun but felt totally safe, we were surrounded by other boondockers and a semi or 2.



If we made it to the Wal-Mart early enough there was even a little time to get to meet some of the others and of course if you need anything the store is very convienent(the point of them letting you stay there).



As far as selling at the Flea Market it went farely well considering it was really the first nice weekend. the people there are really nice and very helpfull. they even let us plug in while we were staying the weekend there.



While searching for things to buy and re-sell we found a wholesale company that sells pallets of several kinds of merchandise to people in this type of business, http://www.wholesallersinc.com/ but they are in PA (maybe good for you but we are in TN and headed for AZ for the winter) (they will ship again better if you were closer) so we did a little more searching and found one locally in TN (sorry keeping this one for myself for now). I'm pretty sure our local auction house gets a lot of there stuff from one of these places(they can afford to buy a semi load at a time- for now we have to stick to a pallet or two).

The thing that I still haven't figured out is what people want. We carry quite a choice of new and pre-owned things for people buy, although tools seem to bring the most attention and every man who walks buy has to pick up hold and shake a hammer, if he has a woman with him she has to remind him he has a garage or shed full of tools and doesn't need any more so they don't move as much as I thought they would. My conclusion for this pondarable question is it's not possible to figure what the people want to buy, so don't try just carry what you want of get the best deals on and it will go just not when or to whome you thought it would sell to.

Starting a Re-Sale business

The Biggest hurdle to starting our re-sale business was finding a true wholesale source for products for our site http://sites.google.com/site/chrischerisresale/

One of the best sources we have found is your local town auction house and the best way to find them we have found is http://www.auctionzip.com/

There are other sources of course depending on what you want to sell the easiest way to search for them is also the simplest and that is to type the word "wholesale" in your favorite search engine.