Sale-ing Takes My Stuff Away

If you have been reading my last so many blogs, you know that we have been doing some serious cleaning at my house. And twice a year, spring or fall cleaning ends in a garage sale. All of the things that we have Bins and Purge –d from our house go into the garage, and sit until its time to have our community garage sale. Some of those items must be carefully contained so that no children see what has been so discreetly removed from their rooms while they were at school or they will end up bringing those items back into the house.  The rest of the items are in boxes, bins, our piled on top of folding tables.

A day before the garage sale I go into the garage and break out more folding tables, wipe them down and then start with the clothes. I group all the clothes into piles of pants, short-sleeved shirts, longs sleeved shirts, sweatshirts, shorts, skirts, ….so on and so forth and then make sections for boys clothes, girls clothes, adults clothes. I never got to work at The Gap, and garage sales are my way of making up for that loss. I will make everything nice and neat and organized, and an hour into our garage sale, everything will be a mess again. And as if my garage is The Gap, I will swoop in, between customers, and resort all of the items, so my customers can easily find what they are looking for.  I usually put a sign on my clothes table saying "all items fifty cents", but this year we branched out and bought a clothes rack to hang the items that were worth putting individual tags on. By worth it I mean more than fifty cents and as high as four dollars a piece. Hey, I have to eat the cost of the ripped in half printable envelope label to price those items. (Not to mention the twenty-five dollars it cost to buy the clothes rack).

The books are sorted into two bins, adult books (no not those kind) and children’s books, again fifty cents apiece. There is a toy table for toys ABOVE twenty five cents, and a bin for toys that ARE twenty five cents, which usually consists of McDonald’s type toys, parts of other toys, and naked Dirty Barbies.  The shoes are all neatly arranged under the clothes table, you wouldn’t believe how well used shoes sell at garage sales. And then there are the rest of the small items: frames, knick knacks, holiday items, random outdated electronic items, you name it, anything an everything we decided we no longer needed and stuff my mom brings me from her house when she purges her own garage and brings it here for me to re-purge.

As I am in my garage getting things prepared, there are usually one or two neighbors that are also preparing for their garage sale and often we find ourselves at each other’s houses doing some “presale shopping”.  It was awesome when I walked over to my neighbor’s garage and noticed how many items were for sale that had been from my last sale! The best part was that the same was true for me, I had items I had bought from my neighbor that were now for sale, again, at my garage sale. “We are both pathetic",  my neighbor said to me, and I agreed. 

So our garage sale was set to open Friday at 9am, late for a garage sale because most open much earlier, but we needed to get our kids to school before we opened. We have had garage sales for over ten years now, and we know that garage salers can be hardcore. If you do not open when you say you are going to open, they will knock on your door and maybe even peer into your windows. Since we had to get our kids into the car (that is parked in our driveway, not our garage), we have to covertly exit out the back door. There may already be people wandering around near your house depending on when your neighbors opened up, you have to not make eye contact with anyone, quickly get into the car and try not to hit anyone while you are backing up. It’s as close to what it must feel like to be in a crowd of zombies on The Walking Dead. Getting down the street can be just as precarious because people are parked all over the sides of the street, and the rules of the road no longer apply, anarchy rules. Once my husband got back from dropping off the kids, it was time to open, I had my Ace hardware tool smock on to keep my cash and change in (its part of the kids pretend tools set), paper, tape and a Sharpy marker in case something needed to be retagged or marked down.

Once you open the garage, you have to move quick. We needed to get all four of our tables out onto the driveway before people started flooding our garage. Once all the tables were out, there were already people going through some of the bins in our garage, we had to pull the bins out while they were looking through them like using a carrot on a stick to get a horse to follow where he needs to go. It was such a nice day that we were able to have all of our stuff on the driveway and none of it in the garage, which rarely happens, but its great because it alleviates the some of the hyper vigilance you need to have at a garage sale, making sure someone won’t try to buy (or walk off with) something that is not for sale. This year, my husband almost sold my favorite flip flops that were not for sale, luckily I was there when the lady picked them up, they were supposed to have been moved to the back porch to dry in the sun but were laying too close to the front of the house.

My favorite picture of our 2nd garage sale ever.
Our neighbor put on a Halloween costume and
helped us promote our sale, for no reason
except it was fun!

Most people will purchase things for what you have them marked as if you keep things cheap, but there will always be people who want to bargain their way down to as low as they can get you to go. The best example of that this year was a man interested in buying a king sized down comforter I had marked as $10.00. He offered me three dollars for it, I said four, he accepted and I added that there were a few bloody (nose) stains on it, that didn’t deter him, but he came back a few minutes later and asked if he could also have the storage bin it had been sitting in. That is where I drew the line. Nice try, sir, those things are for the junk that comes out of my house in six more months.

The rest of the sale went pretty well, we sold about two hundred and sixty dollars worth of our stuff.  The next day the garage sales continued and I decided to use some of the money we made and go out and hunt for treasure, because what's the fun in just selling your junk? I wanted to go find more! I ended up finding all three of my kids roller blade,  a skateboard, a Barbie bed, and a baby playpen for my daughter’s dolls. I spent about twenty-five dollars total, the kids were super excited about our new fond treasures and for twenty-five dollars, it doesn't matter if they only all roller blade once! As one of my fellow garage salers said it best, “Garage sales are more about entertainment than about necessity.” Well said, random person I was talking to while searching through your stuff! 

Once the garage sale was completely over, we bagged and boxed up what was left and took it to the thrift store, my garage is now as clean as my house is. And we bought a power washer with the rest of the money because the outside of our house is still really dirty. The saga continues...

Bins and Purge

Both my husbands and I’s parents live in different states and we have gotten used to living far from extended family, so we have had to create our own little family traditions. For the past two years, my family has made it a new Mother’s Day tradition to go on a hike, go canoeing, or anything that entails being outside. This year we planned on continuing that tradition by going canoeing for the second year in a row but the weather didn’t cooperate and Mother’s Day was so early this year it would have been a little too cold, so we planned on waiting to celebrate until later this month. In the meantime, my Mother’s Day wish was to have every part of my house (at least on the inside) clean at the same time for at least 48 hours.

If you have read my first blog, "Dirty Barbies", you know this wish started weeks ago when I had the sudden urge to clean and purge my master bedroom closet. My closet was actually pretty neat and organized, but the amount of unused clothes gathering dust in there was getting a bit pathetic. I had clothes in there that I couldn’t fit into after having two of my kids over ten years ago. I had clothes in there from when I used to go clubbing on a regular basis, many of which fit my seven year old daughter well enough for her to actually use. I had moved many of these unused clothes from California to Ohio, from Ohio to Alaska, and then from Alaska to Indiana. So it was time for me to not only get rid of clothing items that no longer fit, it was also time for me to get rid of things that a forty year old woman wouldn’t wear even if they DID fit! I'm Cleaning Out My Closet

Not only did I purge a ton of unusable clothing from my closet, but also from my drawers, my husband’s drawers, my children’s drawers, the downstairs coat closet, and the bench where I keep all of our winter gear. Then I cleaned all the drawers and pulled the drawers out and cleaned behind the drawers and you would be shocked at the amount of dust, dirt and lost items that were behind the drawers. I actually found a poster from 1986, an invitation to a wedding for my parents from who knows when, Nerf gun bullets, dead insects, old underwear, and a slew of other items that had been in "The Land of the Lost" for years!

I also purged about twenty-five pairs of shoes. Many of them were handed down to me from my Mom, the queen of shopping and purging. She and I are the same shoe size and so when its time for her to purge the insane amount of shoes she owns, its then time for her to bring them to me and for me to try them all on and try to decide on the spot if I really need them or will really use them or not. Unfortunately, I often decide that, “Yes!” I absolutely do need 15 pairs of flip-flops in different colors and with different adornments on them, only for them to sit in my closet for three years and never be used because I usually wear the same two pair of flip flops 8 months of the year. But what if I go on a Caribbean vacation and need a lime green pair of flip- flops with tiny beaded tassels on them?

 

Then came my seven year old daughter’s room. It “only” took me six hours to purge and clean her room. I went through every single drawer, bin and surface of her room. People love to give Lily things: family, friends, neighbors, teachers, Santa, probably because she is so sweet and cute, but she is also a hoarder. Her Dad and her have made it a tradition to play the crane machine every time we go see a movie at the theater, so she has a ridiculous amount of crap quality movie themed stuffed animals as well. I ended up throwing away a wastebasket full of stuff and taking two laundry baskets full of toys out to the garage for our upcoming garage sale, none of which Lily knows of course. All of this has to be done while she is at school and anything to be sold must be hidden in boxes and trash bags while we prepare for the garage sale. We also plan to have the garage sale while she is at school and whatever doesn’t get sold will be donated promptly before she gets home! I’ve had to do this with my two older boys as well, so I have it down to an art form.

At this point, my boys don’t have nearly as much stuff as Lily does and their rooms mostly just need to be dusted, vacuumed, and deodorized. However, Charlie’s likes to hoard empty boxes, broken battery operated toy pieces, and plastic guns, knives and grenades. And Sammy hoards broken pieces of things he actually breaks on purpose to use for parts for his many creations, monster masks, and currently, Navy Seal Brochures. All of these items were sorted through and cleaned while they were at school, taking only a few hours compared to Lily’s room though. 

Somewhere in my race to make my dream of the entire house being clean all at once for Mother’s Day, I had lost my will to clean and purge any longer and my husband and kids cleaned the rest of the downstairs for me on Mother’s Day itself. I gave instructions to vacuum everything: the walls, the ceiling, the furniture and, of course, the floor. The kids needed to take all their randomly strewn stuff upstairs to their rooms first, and actually put the stuff away, in the correct places, and then, the cleaning began. However many hours later, the house was clean enough for the final touch, carpet shampooing.

It is the Monday after Mother’s Day and lets just say that 99% of the inside of the house is clean, all at once. The shampooing spilled over into today, no pun intended but, in the immortal words of that tiny lady from Poltergeist, “This house is clean.” It smells good, you can see the tops of the tables, the bathrooms don’t smell like urine, and everything is somewhere it can be easily found. I don’t know how many days passed before the poltergeist reared its ugly head again in the movie, but all I ask is for 48 hours before it comes back.