“Whatever you need, you can probably find it here.”
Michelle Busse, an organizer of Brookfield’s community-wide yard sale, told the Landmark the event is back for a fourth year on Saturday, May 31, from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m.
Across town, residents will clear out their garages, closets and back rooms and set up shop in their front yards so you can peruse the wares and, maybe, find a great deal.
“It’s a day where the community comes together, and it’s a wonderful time for everybody involved. Every year, it seems to be getting more popular,” Busse said Friday. “Currently, we have over 280 houses signed up. I think last year, our record was over 320.”
The annual day started in 2022, when Busse first organized it alongside fellow residents Molly Truglia and Kristy Herrera. Last year, Truglia dropped out due to time constraints, but the event now has another organizer in the form of sponsor Agnes Halmon, a local Realtor who covered the costs of promotional signs this year, Busse said.
She said the group mainly solicits sign-ups from households through Facebook, including an event page and a group forum, though the women each do their part to promote it in-person.
“We actually just got the signs put up around town. That’s an undertaking. That was done by Kristy and Agnes,” she said. “I just got back from handing out flyers all over town with one of my other neighbors. It’s a lot of volunteering, a lot of time.”
Busse said she personally responds to people who’ve signed up through Google Forms to send them information and respond to any questions they have. She said much of the work to get the event off the ground happens in the weeks leading up to it.
She said she enjoys organizing the event in part because of her own fascination with yard sales.
“I’m a big garage sale freak. I love going to them. I love having them. Every time I go to a garage sale, and if it’s organized beautifully, if it has everything displayed with the price, I love it,” she said. “But if you go to a garage sale that’s very unorganized, or you’re having to pick through things, it’s like, ‘Eh, I’m not into this.’”
She said the event has started to become a yearly tradition in town.
“We’ll have people in the beginning of the year asking, ‘When’s the sale day?’ People like to plan their vacations around it,” she said. “Normally, we’ve done the sale in May. Last year, we switched it and did it in April, only because of the cicadas. We felt the cicadas may have been a big issue. I would say the majority of people were very supportive of doing it in April; some people were upset, and some people — we got comments like, ‘I thought you guys were doing it in May. I switched my vacation!’”
This year, she said they got complaints that the community-wide yard sale will coincide with the day of the LaGrange Pet Parade.
“Ultimately, we didn’t switch it because, I mean, that’s LaGrange. This is Brookfield,” she said. “We’re not going to switch it because of another town’s event.”
Each year, Busse said, the amount of work involved makes her question if she’ll do it again, but then she finds herself itching to put it together.
“I said last year a few times that I wasn’t going to do it again, and when I started planning it again, both my husband and son were like, ‘Mom, I thought you said you weren’t going to do it.’ I’m like, ‘Well, who else is going to do it?’” she said. “It’s kind of like my baby.”
Despite her attachment to the event, Busse said she would be happy to partner with the village government or chamber of commerce if either group reached out.
“I would be more than open. The more help we can get, I would appreciate it. It is a lot of undertaking,” she said.
She said several members of her extended family will travel to Brookfield to participate in the yard sale at her house, where she’ll have furniture, kitchen items, clothing — “a little bit of everything, really.”
“Probably my favorite part is the comments that we get from people. I don’t think I did this last year, but the previous year, we sent out a survey after the sale, and we just got such a great response back from everybody,” Busse said. “People were like, ‘It was great talking to my neighbors. We made a whole day of it. We brought out our grills, kind of like an impromptu block party.’ People just talking to each other, bringing the community together.”
She said she especially loves to hear about formerly treasured items that found a new home or someone landing a great deal on an item they had been seeking.
“Another’s man junk is another person’s treasure,” she said. “This is a great opportunity to recycle things and have them not go into the landfill.”
