Out with the old

We've gone on a bit of a spending hiatus around here. You see, recently we had to switch insurance carriers and our new plan has a deductible, whereas our last didn't. It's not very high, but it's a chunk, particularly when you have two children with birthdays early in the year, who have also been sick several times already this year, so you combine well visits with sick visits and prescriptions and an unmet deductible and you get a budget hemorrhage. Oh, and there are annual licensing and membership fees for the husband's job (there was a mad dash this week to find all the documentation for the continuing education credits that are a crucial part of the licensing requirements). And, well the aftermath of Christmas still looms in the background. Hence, we are done spending for a little while except for essentials.

Which means this is a perfect time to talk a little about a grassroots money-making venture: a garage sale!

My current garage sale plan actually began a few months ago, in December, after it became clear that there was a possibility that we might be moving to Baltimore in the near future. (NEWSFLASH: we didn't get the job, so we're in Charleston for the next few years at least.) I decided to use the impending move as an excuse to purge, either in anticipation of a move or in preparation for a sale. I began sorting, editing, and collecting stuff in boxes and bins around my house, and I've been doing so ever since. At this point, I've got enough for quite a sale, and I'm not done yet. Today, I tackled a new part of the kitchen, the dishes. I have, it appears, some sort of dish fetish. I have WAY too many plates, bowls, cups, and glasses, and don't even get me started on the number of serving dishes and mixing bowls and assorted kitchen implements. But right now, I have less, since quite a bit of stuff has been shuffled into yet more boxes in my living room. My purging is accompanied by my "helpers." Here's one of them now, moving things along in the kitchen cabinets:






Besides the kitchen, I've sorted through baby clothes and my clothes (though I could probably do that again, perhaps twice), books (I know, gasp!), household items (everything from heaters and shelves to table clothes and picture frames), and toys. I feel I'm doing pretty well, but there is always more to do. Along the way, I've reorganized my pantry, my linen closet, and the storage closet in the office, but the rest of the office looms large, as does the storage closet in the guest room. I have tried to bring the husband along with me on my little organizing binge, but besides finally getting him to sort through his shoes (at which point he threw away 6 pairs, I think), I have had little success. The husband likes to think he only owns essentials, but then you open any random bin of his and find, oh, I don't know, some random stress ball from a drug company or papers the origins and importance of which are long since forgotten. So we've got some work to do there, though not perhaps in preparation to sell anything...unless you're just really into stress balls!

My goal with all of this is to finance a set of bunk beds for J's room. He is really not pleased with his toddler bed and will fast grow out of it anyway, so I want to be able to get bunk beds in the (forlorn) hope that some day my terrible sleepers will be able to sleep together. My secondary goal is to have a place for everything and everything in its place, at least for one shining moment. Right now, part of our clutter problem stems from the piles of orphan objects around our house, objects that have no permanent home. (The other part of our clutter problem is that we don't like to put things away. But that is another battle for another day!) Here are some more shots taken while "we" were cleaning J's room You see how much respect he has for the bed as place for sleeping!