Painful but Cleansing

A couple posts back I posted a "before" picture of the play room in our home. It was literally covered in toys. When I spent 3 days cleaning it, I took the opportunity to do a major purge. I set aside all kinds of things from the playroom for a garage sale.

For the last 5 days I worked to organize my garage sale for maximum profitability. I used many of the suggestions from a handy little booklet called "How to Have Big Money Garage Sales."

The premise of the booklet is that you can do a little work and make a little money, or you can do a little more work and make a lot of money. I didn't have the wallet-busting results some of the satisfied customers testify to, but I surpassed the earnings goal I spoke out loud to friends and family and came close to reaching my secret earnings goal that I kept to myself so no one would laugh at my cockeyed optimism.

I started by cleaning out the garage and then cleaned the toys with antibacterial wipes. I made cute hang tags out of scrapbook paper and attached them with ribbons to clothes I was planning on sending to Goodwill. "Adult clothes don't sell," is what everyone will tell you. I sold almost every article of clothing I put out.

I organized my merch into little areas: the game table, the book bench, the toy tables, and household goods corner. I put 2 or 3 Happy Meal toys each into little cellophane bags and tied them up with a ribbon and arranged them all in a basket with a sign that said, "grab bags, 25 cents each." out of 18 bags, all but 2 sold.

I advertised! Craigslist, the Hillsboro Argus, and 8 strategically placed, graphically appealing signs. I bought latex balloons to put at the foot of my driveway to give treasure hunters the extra clue they needed to find my place. Latex! I hate latex!

My point is, I made some sacrifices.

Was it worth it?

Of course! My main goal was to earn enough money to get me closer to my ultimate goal of buying a Macbook laptop computer. I reached the goal. Life is good.

My secondary goal was to declutter and reclaim space in our house. Check!

At the end of the sale, I boxed everything up and portioned it out to the appropriate places: Goodwill and Northwest Children's Outreach (thanks Jill for the pick up service!)

Everything is gone.

The cars are back in the garage.

And for the first time in a week, I hope to not wake up at 4am with a noisy "to-do" list going through my head.