Shedding The Detritus Of Everyday Life

It's Saturday evening and it's time to update everyone on the happenings of the past few days.

Thursday evening was our pot party. In three words: Not Very Successful. We only had three people show up. It wasn't a total failure as we got rid of quite a few plants.

Friday was moving/garage sale preparation day. The Wife and I both dreaded this day. We especially didn't look forward to moving all the furniture out to the garage. At one point we even contemplated hiring some burly men to move the stuff for us. Turns out we were worrying for nothing. It took us just over an hour to get everything out to the garage. My estimates of which items would be the hardest to move was completely wrong. I expected our 36" Tube television would be the worst but that turned out to be relatively easy. The entertainment armoire that held the TV was by far the hardest. I thought that would be one of the easiest. I was wrong again.

After an hour rest, we went back into the garage and sorted things into different price ranges (25¢, $1, $2 and over). I'm guessing we had at least 200 25¢ and $1 items alone.

After sorting, we rested for another hour or so before we went back out to the garage one more time to actually tag all the items. It turns out it took less time then we expected. The Wife said she thought we still be preparing well into the night but we were finished before 4:00 PM.

Saturday we got up at 5:15 AM to get everything in place. We weren't officially opening shop until 8:00 AM but people were pulling up at 6:00 AM as we were still putting things out on the driveway. The first big items to sell were our 10 year old washer and dryer. The guy who bought these returned 15 minutes later and bought the TV. A good start.

The "J" stopped by to help with the sale. As usual, she was pretty handy.. Thanks "J"!

The next six hours were full of starts and stops. People seemed to come in waves. Unfortunately the rain also came in waves. Yes. You read me right. Rain. It never rains Memorial Day weekend in Southern California. Well, almost never. This year the weather decided to be freaky so three times we had to cover everything in plastic to protect it from the rain. This may have slowed some of the foot traffic but we did pretty well, nevertheless.

The last thing to go was our Bedroom set. We did have a hit on our dining room set but they were supposed to get back to us by 5:00 PM and they haven't called or come by yet. Bummer.

So, what was the final tally you ask? $980 profit. Not bad at all. We didn't sell everything of course but that will be solved by a trip or two to the Salvation Army and/or Goodwill. If the dining room set doesn't sell, it will be donated as well.

The house is starting to feel weird. Half the furniture is gone. We are now watching TV on a 20" piece of ... junk instead of our 36" beauty. Our bedroom has clothes piled on the ground as there are no dressers anymore. We have about two more weeks in the house. The next step in our big move is donating all our leftovers to charity and trashing everything not worth donating. After that, the movers come in and pack our stuff, load the truck, and away we go. We'll be in Omaha before you know it.