Sometimes I wonder to myself what I have gotten myself into.  Do you ever feel that way?  I’ve been selling used and new books online for a little over a year now.  I have grown my little hobby into a business that makes me more in net profit than I do as my full time job as an IT consultant and TWICE as much money as my wife was making before our daughter was born as a receptionist.  It’s quite amazing how much money can be made if you put a lot of sweat equity and some monetary investment into it.

This weekend was no exception.  I was lucky because it was one of the coolest weekends we’ve had in months and hardly no humidity at all.  I have a small warehouse and garage separate from my personal residence that I have my business in.  Unfortunately, this warehouse also has a yard that needs upkeep.  I HATE yard work and was forced to actually do something about it this weekend so that took up a ton of time.

Also, a task in which you guys may find yourself sometime is making more room for more books!  I have a two car garage that is literally filled to the 10 ft ceilings with boxes of books that I have no need for anymore.  I have processed them all and ensured that they are not listable for one reason or another.  I would estimate the number to be close to 40,000 now.  Since the garage was getting overrun by boxes of books, I had to get out all of the other junk in the garage that was in there such as a non working mower, a desk, non working computer monitors and a ton of other stuff.  Luckily, my father has another poll barn where we could move the junk to.  I’m happy to say I now have a full size two car garage with 10 ft ceilings completely dedicated to my new, incoming books and my discarded ones.  I bet I could squeeze another 20,000 in there.  hehe

After bringing in more of the latest book load for processing, I then had to fulfill orders.  I typically have a Sunday through Thursday schedule of order fulfillment so that I can get books out the door as fast as possible.  This means that I have orders stack up on me from Thursday evening after I leave all the way up until Sunday afternoon when I process them again.  Sunday I had a grand total of 60 orders to process!  I told you I was going to blow away last month’s sales of 4 grand!  At times like these, I’m so glad I have my handy Zebra LP-2844 label printer.  Without this printer, it probably would have taken me a TON more time.  I even had to swap out the label rolls that I got from Royal Mailers because I ran out (5% discount on everything, check out the sidebar).

Anyway, I snapped a picture of what the orders looked like on Sunday after I was done.

60 Orders

Needless to say I was pretty spent.  I was happy because I got a great workout, slept like a baby on Sunday night and made a nice chunk of change over the weekend.