Huntington Woods Garage Sale is Hopping on First Day

Cars lined the streets of Huntington Woods’ neighborhoods Friday for the first day of the city’s annual garage sale that runs through the weekend.

“Traffic has been really brisk today,” said Huntington Woods homeowner Jules Sipes who sold most of her sought-after children toys, Disney costumes and CDs before 1 p.m. “The best stuff went quickly.”

After participating in the event almost every year, Sipes is an expert at selling her goods and attracting traffic. Her strategies include bundling children toys together in groups like kitchen, complete with plastic groceries, dishware and appliances, to sell them for a higher price than they would by themselves and keeping her solitary children’s item below the average price for the neighborhood, $5 or under. She also knows how to attract customers.

“My husband’s the one over there yelling 'hot dogs!,' ” Sipes said, pointing to the white tent at the corner of her lot on Lincoln. “He tends to get people’s attention, although at the rate we sold out, tomorrow we may just be selling the hot dogs.”

This is the first year the Sipes family decided to put a hot dog cart in front of their house, hawking dogs from the family catering business Great Lakes Hot Dogs, but Terry Sipes said he thinks the cart was effective in drawing attention to his house.

“We had a good turnout for the first day of the sale,” Terry said. He estimated that he sold around 100 hot dogs over the course of the day. “Though, tomorrow will be booming.”

On the other side of the street, Neal Zalenko’s strategy to attract attention to his and his daughter Karen Weinbaum’s garage sale is to wave a pom pom in the air.

“I haven’t really had to do it too much because the traffic has been really good,” he conceded. “People were walking up to the house before we even had a chance to pull stuff out of the garage.”

Zalenko said he sold a snow blower, and Weinbaum said she, like Sipes, sold out of many of her children’s toys.

“We had tables all the way back into the garage, but the stuff all went,” Zalenko said, gesturing to the few tables that were left in the driveway. “So unless we get a shipment from Walmart tonight, we might not open tomorrow.”

However, even with Friday’s high sale volumes, Jules Sipes said there will still be good finds for shoppers to discover later in the weekend.

“There are more sellers and things to buy on Saturday because people wait until they have the day off work to open,” the garage sale veteran explained. “Then Sunday is deal day since everyone is exhausted and just wants to get rid of whatever they have left.”

The runs 9 a.m.-7 p.m. again Saturday and Sunday.