Wednesday, July 1, 2009

Selling Your Life, Piece By Piece









Garage sales are a very personal thing. You lay out your possessions on tables and tubs and wait for people's approval. You watch them handle your things, clothes worn by your babies, knick-knacks collected when you were a child, pre-baby clothes you will never fit into again. They hold them up for inspection and sometimes they tuck them under their arm for purchase, and sometimes they toss them back carelessly, deeming them not worth the 25 cents on the tag.


You secretly think suckah! when your fish tank goes for fifty dollars. Because you know the hood is broke and my gawd that thing is filthy. You wonder why your perfectly good couch doesn't sell. You start to get desperate towards the end of the day and offer bags stuffed full of clothes for five bucks a piece. It's not the money you want, its the space. That clutter needs to be gone. To make way for new and more shiny clutter of course.


At the end of the day you tally your haul and split it up between yourself and your best girlfriend. The one who brought over an entire thrift store of clothes and baby gear and sat in the hundred degree heat with you for eight hours. You both shove the remaining items back in the garage, mentally making notes about what should be donated, what should be freecycled, and what should just be trashed. And its over. Items that were just this morning on your kitchen counter are on another kitchen counter. Your children's t-shirts are being thrown in the washer to be worn by another child tomorrow. Your fish tank is being furiously scrubbed in hopes of giving another fish more room to breath.



And that's what you have. More room to breath.
And an excuse to shop.

6 comments:

  1. Dropping by from sits. Now following your blog. The weekend is almost here. Yay! I hope you have a fun weekend planned.

    Ms Cupcake.
    Zen Cupcake

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  2. I did a flea market once. I am not suited temperamentally for such things. I would get really mad when people would try to get me to lower the already rock bottom prices on the stuff.

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  3. yard sales hurt me. it kills me watching my babies clothes and gear go. to me each item is worth 1000 dollars of memories and attachment, yet no one wants to pay that. what pisses me off is when i price bentley's brand new looking polo or tommy stuff at like 2$ and people act like i am robbing them blind, i wouldn't be able to function if i walked in somewhere full of 2$ polo stuff. anywhy enough of that, glad you had an awesome sale...now go buy more crap to fill the empty space.

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  4. Ms Cupcake- Thanks for the follow!

    Shania- Suprisingly nobody tried haggling us. We had stuff priced pretty low and people seemed willing to pay. What can I say...too much stuff, I didn't care what it went for.

    Suz-I'd go nuts around $2 TH and RL clothes too! You could tell some people were hiding their surprise at the prices of the clothes and just paying it. W kept saying we should have just started a baby thrift store with everything we had.

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  5. I've tried these, and you're right; it's a heartbreaker sometimes, and just awkward. But space, YAY! Worth almost anything when it gets to that point. Mostly I post things on ebay or just drop them off at charity shops as donations; the face-to-face thing I find difficult.

    Loved your last line... LOL

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  6. It was a long hard day but it was a great bonding experience. It was bittersweet to let our lives go esp since this was my first experience with doing a yard sale. I had a great time and I got a computer out of it YAY!

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