ColumbusGarageSale.com was started in 2004 by me, Joel Smith. Being someone who likes making things (I'm a designer in my day job), mixed with a growing dislike our throw-away culture, developing a web site to promote garage sales was the perfect project for me.

The first version of this site was based on the idea of providing more space for ads, and not charging extra for it. Newspapers always charge by the number of words in an ad. On-line there isn't such a space restriction so I allowed ads to have up to 1000 words.

What I found was that many people still only listed a dozen or so items because they didn't know what they had to sell. They had the pile in the garage, the boxes in the basement and the stuff in the attic, but not the time to sort through everything so they can list it in their ad. The sorting doesn't happen until a day or two before the sale. Somehow I needed to make it easier for people to list items in their sale...

This problem has led to the most recent version of this site. The person placing an ad goes through a list of possible sale items and marks the items that they have in their sale. The more items listed, the less expensive the ad. List 50 or more items and the ad is free. (Note: an item, as it is defined in this program, is when a check box is marked on the master list, not the quantity of that item. For example, a 24 piece cook set would be considered as one item. Another example would be someone who has two watches for sale. In the program, the check box next to watches would be marked and would be counted as one item, even though the quantity listed would be two.)

This is a win-win for both the seller and the buyer. With more items listed, buyers will be able to target the garage sales that have what they want. In turn, sellers will sell more because the buyers will select to visit the garage sales that have more of what they are interested in buying.

This site is still under development and there are going to be some glitches that will need to be fixed. If you run into a problem that is not being addressed in our FAQs, please contact me so I can help you and post it to the FAQ page.

Thank you for visiting ColumbusGarageSale.com and I hope your garage sale experience is a happy one.

Joel Smith