Auntie Kate The Resale Expert

As you all know, my favorite price is free. And my favorite activity is planning consignment, resale, and thrift stores.

And my LEAST-FAVORITE thing is yanking and tugging clothing racks, especially full clothing racks, around a store.

You probably agree. In fact, you’d probably rearrange your shop, if it weren’t such a pain to do (do you hear me, local shop with New Year’s Eve dresses front and center at Eastertime?). Wouldn’t it be great to rearrange your shop sitting down?

Voila! A new Favorite Thing: Arrange-a-Room, courtesy of BH&G.

So how could a E-room planner possibly be a MORE favorite thing? Just click and try. (Update: You now have to log in/ sign up. Everyone wants your contact info. Sigh.) You can even save your plans to cogitate on.

Things I have learned:

• Maximum room size in this program is 36 x 36, a tad short of 1300 sq ft (after all, it’s Better Homes and Gardens, not Better Shops and Stores, magazine) so you might wanna divide up your shop space into areas and work that way (front half, west third, whatever)
• A free-standing single clothing rack is almost 3′ wide, a double rack is 5+’ wide, once the clothing’s on it. I used the couches to indicate clothing racks, since it was easy to resize them with the little handles.
• Don’t forget, each little grey square is 1′ x 1′, so you can leave aisles the proper width.
• Finding someone to actually move everything around usually involves bribery along the lines of a home-cooked meal. The BH&G site has nice recipes.

And don’t feel guilty using BH&G’s tool for your own selfish purposes. Thanks to my meager checkbook skills, I am the proud possessor of a subscription to the magazine until 2012 or somewhere thereabouts. They owe me.

Now that you’ve figured out a better layout for your shop, could it use a little SIZZLE?