If you like "Antiques Roadshow," you will love two of my new TV addictions: "Bargain Hunt" and "Cash in the Attic" on BBC America.

In "Bargain Hunt," two-person teams are set loose on an antiques fair with the equivalent of $400 to buy items to be auctioned off a week later. The team with the most profit wins, although it's not uncommon that both teams end up losers, thanks to questionable taste.

I like TV shows you can talk back to, and "Bargain Hunt" is one of these: "Eighty-five quid for that cracked chamber pot? Are you daft? It's rubbish!" (Since "Harry Potter" infiltrated the culture and we're watching more British telly, we're using more Britspeak at home these days.)

For "Cash in the Attic," people haul stuff out from their potting sheds, curio cabinets and, yes, attics to auction them off to raise cash for new furniture, home repairs, or a holiday (that's "vacation" in American). An expert appraises potential treasures as the occupants ransack their homes room by room.

Of course, only in England would people have stashed amid stacks of dusty old boxes a valuable Victorian-era snuff box, a George III inlaid tea caddy or an original Turner landscape.

Perhaps inspired by these closet-cleaning spectacles, I decided it was time to sort through my own stuff for an event I called "Cash in the Carport," otherwise known as a garage sale (or "car boot sale" to you Brits out there).

No snuff boxes or tea caddies here — mostly a lot of junk I bought at Ross or at other garage sales, along with a few Christmas gifts still in their boxes. (Who needs an ice cream maker when you're on a first-name basis with Ben and Jerry?)

The garage yielded an assortment of skateboards, soccer balls, bicycles, golf clubs, a surfboard, a kayak and six large garbage bags of gently used or new clothing we never got around to hauling to the thrift store. From the rest of the house came kitchenware, books, jewelry, purses, shoes, toys and various decorative items.

My husband and I part ways when it comes to hosting garage sales.

He wants to make real money and my goal is simply to get rid of the junk by selling it "cheap as chips," as the host of "Bargain Hunt" likes to say.

As far as I'm concerned, the worst thing that can happen is having to pack all that stuff up and haul it back inside.

While I was granting deep volume discounts, he sold a skateboard for $25 that he had picked up at the swap meet for $10. Earlier, I had offered it to a customer for $5.

At the end of the day, we had cleared several hundred bucks, and since everything was set up and we still had more stuff to put out, we did it again the following weekend with similar results.

All in all, it was absobloodylutely brilliant. Cheers!

Reach Christie Wilson at cwilson@honoluluadvertiser.com.