I know that the end result of all this purging is supposed to be a newly decluttered and simplified home but - haha - meanwhile? No one warns you about meanwhile. I sit here in my office at my computer literally surrounded by stacks of books. And padded envelopes with books in them awaiting payment so I can mail them out. And a stack with postage waiting to be dropped at the post office. And there are books in the hallway. And bags of clothes. Plus I’ve been spending so much time on this stuff that the rest of the house is TOTALLY out of control. Toys everywhere, laundry in various states of disarray, more clutter (the kind we are keeping) accumulating.

And then there is the organizational end of it all. I have like 100 books for sale and of course few people want to buy them all, so I am selling one here and one there and so I have to try to track who bought what, whether they are picking it up or I am shipping, whether they have paid or not and when they plan to pick their stuff up. And then there are those people who say “I’ll come by Friday to get my stuff” but, haha, Friday has 24 hours in it and we are a little busy. An actual hour time span would be helpful. Not that I’m complaining becuase I’m glad to get it out of here. But I am somewhat questioning the sanity of not just donating everything to a worthwhile cause, taking the write-off and moving on with life.  My calendar suddenly looks totally full just waiting for people to show up and unload this stuff.

You know what else would have been easier? A garage sale. I have never thrown a garage sale becuase I consider them totally overwhelming. You have to clean stuff, price stuff, display stuff. ALL THAT WORK!!! But now I am beginning to understand. All that work for one or two days versus all that work spread out over a few weeks. I’ll take the garage sale any day.

But here’s a little motivation: our new neighborhood DOES NOT ALLOW GARAGE SALES! So I simply can’t put this off and hope to unload everything in the warm Texas heat. Nope. It is now or never. More or less.

The good news is I have inventoried every book I am willing to part with. I have listed them at half.com and on various email loops locally. That was the hard part. We sold our reef aquarium (sob) but we like the new owners a lot so that makes it easier. We have sold off a lot of our bigger stuff we won’t need to take. I still need to inventory our garage and our basement a bit better but I think most of the hard work is done. Now I can just check email for new sales periodically and try to stay on those people who are supposed to pick stuff up. I think I’m going to take all these clothes to a resale shop instead of trying to sell them online. So today’s goal is to try to find some decently priced packing supplies (bubble mailers are expensive!) and try to catch up on laundry and housekeeping in general.

On another note: tomorrow is Valentine’s Day. Anyone doing something fun?  For Valentine’s Day Tony bought me a serger. Oh wait, I bought that for myself. Haha. It should arrive today. To say I’m excited is an understatement. I won’t have time to use it until we are in Texas but I knew I’d wimp out and never get it so I did it now. Meanwhile my kids are frantically making Valentines this morning. I have a few goodies for them for tomorrow. It was unfun trying to find things for Addison though. She gets a little doggie and a pair of sunglasses. haha. No chocolate or conversation hearts for her quite yet. I’m not a huge fan of Hallmark holidays but I like to make it fun for the kids. This is a pic of the little Vday mailboxes that align our mantle.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 13th, 2007 at 12:03 pm and is filed under House Keeping, Moving, Venting. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.