The Price of Decluttering: A Tale of My Saturday Morning

These past twenty-four hours have been a positively exhausting. This morning I (nearly) single-handedly had my first garage sale. (I will give my husband credit for watching Livers all morning on less than five hours sleep, moving a few things last night, and making sure I wasn't assaulted by masked men at 11:30 last night as I put my sign on my mailbox; and my parents, who came over with breakfast at 7:30 this morning to keep me company and keep the crazies from stealing the junk, I mean priceless treasures of my past.)

Most of it started earlier in the week when I quickly went through my house and pulled out every piece of sellable junk I could find. This was a surprisingly easy task, because being the organized, anal-retentive freak of nature that I am, I tend to go through my stuff on a semi-annual basis to cleanse and purge, because I hate the clutter. I also went to my parents Thursday to take out any junk that I'd left there in my single days, and they willingly donated some of theirs to the cause as well. Perk for the work: I got to keep their profits.

After Livers went to bed Friday I furiously gathered all of my things in the basement to sort and price them. This took a good two hours, all the while I was subjected to my husband's solution to the lack of football problem: the College World Series (bleck). I finally got everything organized and ready to go for Saturday morning around midnight, and after a little blog reading I was in bed at 12:30.

Let's just stay that 5:30 came way too soon. I went to bed running on adrenaline and woke up not feeling rested at all. But alas, I had work to do. It threatened rain while setting up, so I had to cram a lot of my goods into my very tiny garage. By 6:40 I was finished, and at 6:45 I had my first customer. Some people just don't get that 7-12 means do not arrive at the butt crack of dawn when people haven't had their morning coffee. (Also, unfortunately for Jeremy, 6:45 was the time when I could hear Livers waking up with her usual "Mama, MaMA, MAAAAAMAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!" That'll teach him to go to bed late when it's his responsibility to watch her in the morning ;) )

All in all, it was a successful sale. I won't bore you with the play-by-play, but here are a few highlights:

• Someone stole a pair of my husband's shoes I had for sale. Come on people, cough up the measly 2 bucks for the sneaks.
• I got rid of my big-ass entertainment unit that had been the thorn in my side.
  
• A guy talked to my parents for a good ten minutes about eating groundhog. I kid you not. He said it's yummy, especially if it was killed for eating all of the melons in your garden and was nice and sweetly plump for it. I'll stick to chicken.
• A guy picked up rocks in my yard and asked if they were for sale. I said they weren't, but said he could buy them for 25 cents a piece. He bought three. Some people are weird.
  

For the relatively small amount of effort I put into it, the garage sale was very successful. I made over $200 for what amounts to approximately 9-10 hours of work (sitting at the sale included), which is more than I made per hour when I taught. If all garage sales were this easy then I could see it being something I do to clean my house out every couple of years.

I'm off now to a night away from the kid. The grandparents have graciously agreed to watch Livers tonight so J and I could have a much needed date, so we're going to live it up with a good old-fashioned dinner and a movie.