the great minimizing event.
tomorrow is the garage sale. i have never hosted one before, so this is such a new experience for me. ever since i made the first of 21 moves when i left my parents' house for college, i have accumulated stuff. stuff i thought i needed. stuff that i would, of course, never have to replace or lose interest in, or grow out of. and stuff that i could have just because i could. it's so easy to justify the stuff when you have arguments like that. almost every one of those 21 times that i packed my life up in boxes and bins and bags, i would decide that i needed to get rid of some stuff. simplify. i'm all about simplification. i subscribed to real simple for two years. now i just buy it almost every month. see? i'm all about simplification. i just never get to that point.but tomorrow is the garage sale. i was motivated by two things. one, i now have a garage, which i haven't had since i left my parents' house. two, maple lake has an annual all-city garage sale. i.e. no need to advertise, people just swarm. other people have jumped on the bandwagon of my garage sale, which seems to have created more work for me. as if i actually had spare time.
my mom, who is quite the trooper, is a big help. a lot of the stuff being stored in my garage is hers and she's been over once to sort stuff. she'll be there all day today doing the same and will be there for most of the day tomorrow. i'm glad she'll be there today by herself, because when she was over last week, she annoyed me. i was plugging away, having someplace to be when we were done, and she was lollygagging over in the corner for, like, 8 years. she'd be going, going, then she'd find a stack of papers and decide to check out each individual paper. since they've been in storage, forgotten, for a few years, they certainly must be worth saving. so i kept getting annoyed with her because i was working and she was slowly deciding. i was all about getting rid of, she was thinking, maybe keep.
last night, i actually started pricing. i have no idea how to price a garage sale. i don't want any of the stuff, so i wanted to price cheap so it would sell. but i didn't really know what that meant. my grandma said a quarter is pretty cheap and you could get away with a lot of stuff being twenty-five cents. most people will part with a quarter, whether they need the stuff or not. but as i started to sort more boxes & bins, i saw my mother. eerie, huh? i was second guessing myself left & right about stuff. i should probably keep this. aaahh, so and so gave me this... can't sell that. doesn't matter that it's been living in a rubbermaid tub for two years, someday i'll want to see this as i'm tripping down the never-ending memory lane. to my credit (and to my mother's), most of the stuff that was hemmed and hawed over was eventually put in the sell pile. but it certainly called my attention to my week-old annoyance at her putzing. oh, to be convicted. this is the fruit of life. one would be surprised to find that i am not a dancer. no, no i'm not. as much as i'm kept on my toes, i am not gracefully gifted.
anything that doesn't sell tomorrow will be given either to this great place in annandale called the free store, which is really like a salvation army, only you don't have to pay to get the stuff; or to my girls down in minneapolis. then all i will be storing are empty bins. for the next time i move.
so tomorrow is the garage sale. finally, after eight years, my dreams of the simplification process will be implemented. how good this feels. and what a great way to keep me away from purchasing more stuff at everyone else's minimizing events. it's like a weight loss program for the home.
posted by julie @ 10:06 AM
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