I am on a mission to declutter my house.
While I would dearly love to take a week off work and go through my house room by room ruthlessly eliminating anything I haven’t used/touched/worn/read in the last 12 months (or two years, or whatever the home organisation gurus say is the appropriate time frame), but I don’t really have enough leave to make that possible.
Plus I have a small child, with whom I really want to spend time before he starts school and takes his first steps into the big wide world without me.
So the more sensible approach is a more slow and steady – one drawer at a time – type process. I started months ago, and I’ve stopped, started and stopped again.
Meanwhile the piles of stuff I don’t want but don’t know how to get rid of have begun to make navigating the house a rather difficult, and possibly dangerous, pursuit.
So when our friends said they were having a garage sale and asked if we wanted to bring some of our stuff over to put in the sale, we jumped at the chance.
Consequently the decluttering became a bit more frantic and several trips were made to our friends’ house over the last week to drop off unwanted items.
This is the first garages sale I’d been involved in and wasn’t sure what to expect. I’d been told that blokes from second hand shops often turn up with big trucks and offer dirt cheap prices for heaps of your junk, which would have suited me fine. The way I looked at it, they'd be paying us money to take our stuff away. Win win!
We didn’t expect to make much money, so most stuff was $2 or less. The point was to get rid of the junk rather than get rich.
And in the end we didn’t do either. Well, we got rid of some of the stuff, we made a bit over $100, we had a nice day with our friends and juniordwarf had a great time staying with his grandmother. One of the charity bins will soon be getting a sizeable donation of clothes, the tip shop got some new stock and the free classified ads in the paper might be getting a bit of a workout soon. Overall it was a pretty good day.
Things I learned from the garage sale were: (1) no matter how cheap they are, people don’t buy clothes from garage sales. (2) Baby toys sell pretty well. (3) Books don’t. (Not even second hand bookstores want my books!) (4) Drinking too much wine at the post-sale gathering gives you a hangover.
No wait, I already knew number (4). I just still haven’t learned that particular lesson.
And the man in the truck? We’re still waiting for him.
I would buy books, I just never get to garage sales. Of course, Nat would kill me for buying books, but that's nothing unusual. He's at the resigned stage now.
ReplyDeleteWhen I go to garage sales, the first thing I look for is books. Fiction or cookboks for preference, but an old gardening book goes down well too.
ReplyDelete