Books and Clothes and Shoes, Oh My!

Picture this:  A family of five moves into a house that is already full from 34 years of wonderful living with children, grandchildren, and grandparents.  They bring with them an entire UHaul truck full of their household belongings, including furniture.  All unwanted items from two households are stacked in boxes by the French doors in the dining room and spill out onto the large porch.  If you can picture a maze to get into the house, you got it!  ALL of these boxed up and unwanted items must make it to the yard sale tables ready for eager buyers to descend and purchase these treasures!  I’m not sure this paints a picture of the massive amount of treasures we had to sell, but I hope you get the idea.  We were overwhelmed by the “stuff”.

Yard Sales are not my thing!

I’ll be honest.  I’ve had a couple of yard sales years ago and didn’t make enough money to feel it was worth my time.  We live off of the main road so visibility is one issue.  We live on the quiet side of town and not much traffic here is another issue.   Finally, we live in a neighborhood of working middle class folks, not considered high end which I know many yard salers avoid.  I was hopeful because this time, we had more than ever and some really nice things.  I know that we didn’t have the time to “present” items as we would have liked but they were grouped together in an organized way.

How’d we do?  We had steady traffic on day one and a trickle of traffic on day two of the yard sale.  We made some money and did get rid of some things.  It was fun to see others excited about our treasures.  But…there was ALOT left over.  In fact, it looked like we hadn’t sold anything at all at the end of it.

What do you do with all of the left over stuff?

Well, our clothes and shoes were so nice, barely used we were thinking, my daughter Michelle and I spent the next couple of weekends and hours and hours staging and photographing the clothes and shoes to sell on Facebook Marketplace.  What did we learn from that?  Just go ahead and donate and save yourself the time.  We had to store these items.  It’s Florida in August with rain everyday so we were combating moisture and mildew which decided the fate of many things that were ruined as a result.

More Purging!

So the next couple of weeks, I spent every day going out to the yard sale tables, taking the tarps off and sorting the items to be sold on EBAY or Facebook Marketplace, donate, trash, keep.  I know what you are thinking!  Didn’t we already do this?  We did  but consider this the final purge.  Everyday the amount was less and less.  Rain clouds would form and I’d retarp the area and wait for rain to clear or begin again the next day.  Meanwhile, Gary made trip after trip to the dump and to donate to local charitable organizations.

So how does this make me feel?

I remember the day that the area had returned to its uncluttered state.  That was a happy day!  Inch by inch, anything is a cinch.  Mile by mile, we’ll get there in awhile!  We were making progress.  We had purged our house of 34 years of “stuff”.  We had purged our yard of the leftovers.  We were living happily in our cozy little Ruff Road everyday.  We were blessed to be Grandma/ Grandpa School Transportation to our grandchildren.  We weren’t on the road yet, but we were happy.  Life couldn’t be better!

But there’s more…

We were making progress but there were still two sheds to deal with.  The sheds were the next stop on our to do list.  Inch by inch, this is getting done, too.  Our goal was to be completely done by the end of the year and at this updated writing, we are almost there.  The only things left to do at this point is sell off our EBAY/ Marketplace inventory or donate it and finish the scanning and digitizing of our photos and videos.

Reflection…

Even though I do not care for yard sales, I liked getting all of the “stuff” out of the house.  Things that seemed so precious in the house lost their appeal on a yard sale table making it easier for me to say goodbye.  We were able to move forward with the final clearing.  It was freeing, just like when we purged the house.  We felt lighter after the house and even lighter after the yard sale purge.

If Gary were doing this on his own, it would be a much quicker process.  He’s not as sentimental or as much of an overthinker as I am.  So if you are like him, you will get done in half the time or less than we did.  However, if you are the least bit sentimental and tend to overthink things, then welcome to my club.  I’m sharing because if I can let go and do it, you can too.  Happy Purging!

If you have some yard sale reflections you would like to share, add them to the comments and share.  🙂