y-a-r-d-s-a-l-e, yardsale...

so Saturday was the community yard sale in my townhouse complex. I had been looking forward to it for a while, because I had a bunch of crap I wanted to unload, hopefully in exchange for money.

So I was up around 6:45 on Saturday morning and dragging crap out to the road that splits my court from the one next to it by 7:20- by which time most of my neigbors were already set up. There were quite a few people selling, and a decent amount of customers.

There was probably more stuff I could have dragged out to sell, but I didn't have a whole lot of time to get stuff together (well, that and I'm bad at prioritizing and time management). I dragged out ski boots from last year's auction buy, some housewares, some health and beauty items from my couponing days, some consumer electronics that I've been dragging to hamfests, and a bunch of xxl clothes from my fatter days.

I did pretty well. I sold 5 pairs of ski boots (4 to the same guy), and a ton of other stuff. I started out with $50 in my pocket to make change, plus a small handful of quarters, and ended up with $129 and a much larger handful of quarters - so I would guesstimate that I made about $85. Not bad for a bunch of stuff that's been hanging around my house for the last year.

I also loaded up the truck at the end of the sale with the rest of the kid's ski boots that I had left, plus the xxl clothing I had left, and dumped it at the Goodwill on my way to the gym that night. So I have less crap, and that's good.

When I was sorting stuff, I pulled out the better clothes and those are going on eBay- I probably won't get much (based on previous experience) but I'll get something, plus some feedback (hopefully positive).

I realized when I was getting stuff together for the sale how much crap I have in my basement. About 2/3 of my basement is storage/laundry room unimproved space - the rest is the family room (where the NibblerCam is. The sale helped a little, but I still have most of the room stacked with crap, and need to put in some serious time doing cleaning. Cleaning is my least favorite activity, and I hate getting rid of stuff, but it needs to be done - someday I'm going to need or want to move, and the less crap I have, the better - especially if I can monetize some of that crap. More short-term, I have a set of Pearl Export drums in the basement of my parent's house in NJ that I haven't played since about freshman year in college. I'd love to export them to Maryland and start playing again, but I can't justify setting them up anywhere other than the basement, both for space concerns and to minimize the impact on my neighbors. So I need to get a chunk of space cleaned out for that.