Off-and-on drizzles and downpours made for a damp day for participants in townwide yard sales in Red Bank and Fair Haven Saturday.

Still, redbankgreen found plenty of plucky sellers and buyers.

To enlarge the photo display, start it, then click the embiggen symbol in the lower right corner. To get back to redbankgreen, hit your escape key.

As the headline suggests, the weekend that awaits is jammed with the potential for good times.

We’ve got the fifth Red Bank Townwide Yard Sale, this one making a migration from fall to spring.

We’ve got one of the inaugural events of this year’s weeklong Paint the Town Pink festivities to raise awareness about breast cancer and the importance of early detection.

And capping it all off, rain or shine, is the first-ever Red Bank International Flavour Fest, an outdoor celebration of the wide variety of cuisines available year-round at Red Bank restaurants.

And Mother Nature appears to be in a mood to cooperate.

Details, as they used to say when that was still a two-syllable word, are just below.

SATURDAY: Red Bank Townwide Yard Sale
Location: all over town. Maps available at the Red Bank Public Library and at many of the participating homes.
Time: Officially, from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m., but sellers can set their own hours.

From an email update from Beth Hanratty, president of the Friends of the Red Bank Public Library, which has hosted the event since 2010:

lots of records, books and air conditioners

SATURDAY: Pink Hat Tea Party
Pilgrim Baptist Church
172 Shrewsbury Avenue
Doors open 10:30 a.m., Event 11 a.m. to 1 p.m.

Don’t miss this important Paint the Town Pink event, presented by Riverview Medical Center. Gather all the special women in your life to join us for an educational and entertaining Pink Hat Tea, with a hat and apparel fashion show courtesy Geneva’s Boutique of Neptune, a speacial presentation from Adi Smolinsky, M.D., a Riverview Medical Center OB/GYN, education about Paint the Town Pink’s mission of the importance of annual mammography, and more! Refreshments will be provided by Jameson’s Ultimate Southern Cooking Restaurant in Neptune. Don’t forget to wear your pink hat!

*Pink Sale Event. Deck your pink all year long with our exclusive Paint the Town Pink gear and goodies for sale at this signature event.

This event is FREE but registration is required. RSVP: 1-800-DOCTORS

SUNDAY: Paint Everything Pink Community Day
Riverview Medical Center parking lot
1 p.m. to 4 p.m.

Pink your town, pink your house, pink your family. Everything is pink at our family-centered, free Community Day! Featuring many of the same pink “zones” families have come to expect as well as exciting new ones, this year’s event will feature:

Kids’ Fun & Games: Rides, arts and crafts, face painting – all the things your kids have come to love! And don’t miss photos with Dr. Bernard from the Pawsitive Action Team at
K. Hovnanian Children’s Hospital.

Pink it Yourself Man Cave: In line with this year’s theme of Men in Pink, our “man cave” will offer the men in your life an area just for them. Activities will include DYI demonstrations from the Home Depot, interactive games, and of course our exclusive Real Men Wear Pink t-shirts.

Rockin’ Country Thunder 106.3: Bring out the country in you! With live music from a local country artist, this local-favorite station will have you dancin’ in your boots. Your kids will love our pony rides and everyone can enjoy some good old fashioned root beer!

And that’s not all! Enjoy some snack-food favorites and other sweet treats, and beverages from a number of local pink partners, and don’t forget to stop by our educational tables to pick-up important information about Paint the Town Pink’s mission of raising awareness of the importance of annual mammography.

Special Pink Cotton Candy and Snow Cones presented by Arrow Limousine.

SUNDAY: Red Bank International Flavour Festival
White Street Parking Lot
12 p.m. to 7 p.m., rain or shine

Here’s the National Weather Service forecast:

Saturday: Mostly sunny, with a high near 68. Northeast wind between 10 and 13 mph.

Sunday: Mostly sunny, with a high near 68. Northeast wind around 9 mph.

By DUSTIN RACIOPPI

Noticing her neighbors in Fair Haven and Red Bank were finding success with bargain-based weekends, Lori Saybolt decided it was time for business and home owners in Little Silver to unify and get in on the action.

“Other towns have done it and I thought it’d be a great thing to model,” said Saybolt, who helps run the non-profit gift shop The Woman’s Exchange on Church Street  and is president of the borough’s business association. “It just creates a much more of a community experience, so we’re hoping to see a lot more people coming into town.”

Rather than having  the usual sidewalk and yard sales scattered on the calendar, Saybolt went to work pulling them all together for what’s to be the first borough-wide sale, a three-day affair chock full of deals and one ‘Done Good‘ cause.The event gets started Thursday morning with a downtown sidewalk sale.

While shoppers are taking advantage of specials, the Skin & Bones Day Spa, also on Church Street, will hold a bone marrow donor drive in memory of the late Bob Brummer, an Oceanport business owner and Little Silver resident who died of Leukemia in May. The event runs from 9 a.m. to 7:30 p.m.

The sale continues Friday and Saturday and includes all downtown businesses, even ones without brick-and-mortar spaces, Saybolt said.

“Anybody without a storefront is welcome to come and bring pamphlets or talk about their businesses,” she said. “That’s what we do in the business association, is we try to help each other out.”

On Saturday only, the borough will hold a townwide yard sale. Registration permits are $5 and can be obtained at borough hall.

The combined sales will be a gauge for future events in town, Saybolt said. Since the business association was started three years ago, it had held random sidewalk sales while residents put together their own rummage days throughout the year. This, she said, may be the first of many collaborative efforts to come.

“We’re hoping whatever it is, it will be successful and then it’ll grow from there,” Saybolt said.

Ah, the smell of newly mown grass, fresh flowers and soggy, basement-fermented mattresses.

Yes, if it’s the second Thursday in April, it must be the surest sign of spring in Red Bank: the return of bulk waste pickups.

Spring comes first to the borough’s West Side, ending the annual five-month moratorium on bulk waste cartage. Homes west of Broad Street will hereafter get pickups on the second Thursday of each month through October.

Homes east of Broad Street get their first pickups next Thursday, April 21, and on the third Thursday of each ensuing month.

But with the pickups come rules, and enforcement. First and foremost: YOU MUST CALL TO SCHEDULE A PICKUP. Failure to do so exposes you to a summons and a $50 fine. Call the borough Department of Public Utilities at 732.530.2770 and be prepared to detail exactly what you’ll be leaving at the curb.

There are other limitations, too. Here’s the DPU’s annual newsletter, which includes the regulations, pickup schedules and zone designations: 2011dpunewsletter

Of course, for those hard-to-part with items, you might consider holding onto them for another five-and-a-half months and putting them up for sale at the fourth annual Red Bank Townwide Yard Sale, scheduled for Saturday, October 1.

It’s sale time, as Saturday’s Red Bank Townwide Yard Sale gets ready to unfold under warm and sunny skies.

Today, the Yard Sale website carries the third-annual event’s information packet for shoppers, a downloadable PDF that includes a locator map and addresses of registered sellers, along with brief information about what’s for sale.

More than 115 homes are participating in the border-to-border bargain bonanza, which this year has a new host: the Friends of the Red Bank Public Library. In conjunction with the event, the group is kicking off a three-day used-book sale at the library Saturday morning.

The library, at 84 West Front Street, will also be where registered yard-sale sellers can pick up free helium balloons to decorate their home displays and help visitors find them. Balloons will be available from 7:30 to 10a.

The info pack is available at the Yard Sale website, which has helpful information on how to conduct a successful yard sale, what to do with leftover goods, and feature stories.

Have a great time, folks, and please remember to be careful crossing streets with your armloads of bargains.

Registration is now open for the third annual Red Bank Townwide Yard Sale, scheduled for Saturday, September 25.

Event co-sponsor redbankgreen has created a new yard sale website to serve as the clearinghouse for information about the event, which last year drew thousands of visitors to more than 125 homes across town.

The site features a Q&A addressing questions about the event. It also contains a registration form that residents must submit in order to have their addresses and select items they’re selling listed in an information packet that will be distributed to shoppers. The registration fee for sellers is $10, with proceeds going to the event’s new host organization, the Friends of the Red Bank Public Library.

Also on the site: an article about a recent yard sale in Rumson; tips on planing your yard sale; photos from last year’s event and more.

Here’s the registration form. Click on the image below to open the printable PDF. (You’ll need Adobe Reader to open it; this is a free app available here.)

2010 Yardsale Registration Form

This one’s slated for noon to 4p at 186 Branch Avenue.

Items to be sold include:

Baby Room Furniture – Honey Finish Wooden Changing Table/Dresser plus
matching armoire

Vinyl Records (pop & punk LPs, plus LOTS of classical 78s)

Metal Futon Frame and Futon (Queen Size)

Books for Kids and Adults

Steve Keene Paintings

Archie Comics (’70s–90s)

Toddler Toys

Oak Lawyer’s Chair (needs work)

Some kids’ and adult clothing, computer stuff, CDs, and more.

Parking is on the opposite side of the street only.

Have you got a yard sale or block party planned? If you’re in the redbankgreen coverage area (from Lincroft to Sea Bright), we’ll consider publicizing it. Send us an email and include the who, what, where and when (including rain date, if any), please. You must also include your real name and phone number for verification purposes.

Red Bank’s South Street aims to give Fair Havenites a bit of concerted competition when they band together for a blocklong yard sale this Saturday.

The event, featuring sales at nine homes, runs from 9a to 1p, rain or shine.

The reference to Fair Haven, in case we left you in the dark, has to do with the borough’s combination townwide yard sale and sidewalk sale, also scheduled for Saturday.

Have you got a yard sale or block party planned? If you’re in the redbankgreen coverage area (from Lincroft to Sea Bright), we’ll consider publicizing it. Send us an email and include the who, what, where and when, please.

And mark you calendars for the third annual Red Bank Townwide Yard Sale, scheduled for Saturday, September 25. We’ll have more details as we get closer to the event.

Bargains await shoppers at both the townwide yard sale and the sidewalk sales by borough merchants.

By DUSTIN RACIOPPI

Whether you prefer to find your bargains on grass or concrete, Fair Haven’s got a platform for you to root them out this weekend.

Used and new items will be on display this Saturday as the borough puts on its first one-two punch of mass retailing with a town-wide yard and a sidewalk sale.

Remember back in February, when the borough decided to give a borough-wide yard sale a shot, and nobody really knew what kind of interest people would have in it?

The verdict flooded in.

Number of homes in the borough: about 2,000. Number of homes registered for the sale: 162.

“That’s an amazing response,” Mayor Mike Halfacre said. “About one in 10 families is going to have a yard sale? That’s huge.”

Plenty more residents, not to mention visitors, are expected to show up to take advantage of some steals. The yard sale piggybacks onto the spring sidewalk sale put on by some 50 local businesses.

“It’s going to be a busy weekend in Fair Haven,” borough Administrator Mary Howell said. “It’s been very well received. People are excited.”

The sidewalk sale begins on Friday, and anybody wishing to get a jump-start on the yard sale may also start Friday. Saturday, though, is when the bargain action is expect to really going.

Maps will be available at borough hall and many businesses identifying the residences that are registered for the yard sale. Those homes will also be decorated with orange balloons, Howell said.

Meanwhile, downtown merchants will have their walkways teeming with various wares at discounted prices, said Michel Berger, president of the Fair Haven Business Association.

He said the two sales are a perfect opportunity to put some extra cash in homeowners’ pockets while also promoting the borough. He found after last fall’s successful Tour De Fair Haven bike race that merchants wanted another way to bring people to town.

“We needed something for spring,” Berger said. “Really, we hope people will come experience Fair Haven and enjoy what we have to offer.”

The sidewalk sale runs from 10a to 6p on Friday; The sidewalk and yard sales will take place from 9a to 4p on Saturday.

Halfacre wants to point out that because there’s expected to be a considerable amount of trash or unwanted items leftover from the weekend, public works will be open Monday for people to drop those items off. The DPW yard on Allen Street will be open for bulk drop-off from 7a to 3:30p Monday.

Bulk pickup is also available on Thursdays for a fee of $50. Call (732) 747-0241 ext. 219 for more information or to schedule a pickup.

Here’s the map of participating homes:

By DUSTIN RACIOPPI

Bargain hunters can start licking their chops, because Fair Haven is heaping a town-wide yard sale onto its already-popular semiannual sidewalk sale.

The Borough Council gave the green light Monday for the Fair Haven Business Association to spearhead the event, which will coincide with the borough sidewalk sale in May.

That means the rush is on to get all the particulars worked out beforehand — making maps, promoting the sale and more than likely, talking to its neighbors in Red Bank to get tips on how that annual sale, held in September, is run.

“We’ll get an idea of what Red Bank does,” Mayor Mike Halfacre said. “But if we’re going to do it in May, we have to get on the ball.”

One objective of having the town-wide event is to capitalize on the crowds that the sidewalk sale draws, but also to try and steal away a little business from eBay, said Maureen Bay, owner of Gem of an Idea and former association president.

“You have a lot of people in Fair Haven who are out of work and putting their stuff on eBay. Why not try to get them to sell their stuff in Fair Haven?” she said.

Business association president Michele Berger said given that fact, “the timing is perfect for a garage sale.”

Bay said she has no real gauge on just how many people might be interested in taking part in the yard sale, but if it goes well, there could be a second one, in conjunction with the borough’s end-of-summer Fireman’s Fair, which is one of the largest in the state, according to the fire department website. That event already coincides with the second of two yearly sidewalk sales.

“We usually get thousands of people,” Bay said. “That can only be enhanced with more for people to see and do.”

And, she added jokingly, if the event becomes big enough, “(People) might even find out where Fair Haven is.”

Although the details still need to be worked out, the council tentatively decided on charging a $5 registration fee for homes that want to participate. The fee is to have a way to keep track of who’s involved, Halfacre said, and not to try and make money off of the sale.