Grow Old With Me, The Best Is Yet To Be...

Monday, June 11, 2012

Yard Sale!

Over the past month or so, I have been on a mission to eliminate ALL clutter in our home. I have gone through every box, every cabinet, every bin, basket, and drawer in this house. After an exhausting 3-day yard sale on the weekend of June 1st and we raked in over $1300. Kasey and I haven't had a garage sale in about 7 years, we have had full intention on doing one sooner but I have a tendency to over-think and over-analyze EVERYTHING so I made actually doing it quite overwhelming. This year I was fed up and decided I was going to just do it already. So I spent about 3 weeks going through all of our possessions, 1 week pricing everything, and threw it out on the lawn... I got rid of all our baby items, I bawled my eyes out all weekend because it's hard to accept that the baby stage is already all over for us. I cried when I was putting out all of our baby clothes and especially their Christmas dresses. I sobbed when I sold our swing, jumperoo, bath tub, bouncer, and car seat to a pregnant smoker. Breaks my heart. I sold everything at any price because my bottom line was ultimately to have it gone - item brand new $125, marked at $20, they had $3... SOLD! No joke. What didn't sell by Sunday afternoon, we donated to a lady that owns a thrift store in Hanna, WY. She's known to give more than she sells, so it felt great to help. We donated over 200 cute, clean baby girl outfits {some still with tags}, over 20 pairs of shoes in good/great condition, 10 large baby/toddler toys that we have outgrown, 2 boxes of other toys, 2 large boxes of stuffed animals, household items, and all kinds of other miscellaneous. She hauled away 2 truck loads of our no longer needed goodies.
In the process of sifting through all of our things, I found this. Made my day :) Kasey wrote it on a box when we were moving into our first home together. The box was in horrible condition so I had to recycle it and since I am NOT a hoarder (haha!) I took a picture of it and moved on :-)

I spent the next few days after our successful yard sale cleaning and organizing the house and it was immaculate when we left for a short vacation last Thursday. Best of all, we taught the girls some valuable lessons - letting go of once treasured possessions when we outgrow them {just because you were given that when you were 2 doesn't mean we need to keep it forever... a.k.a. hoarding}, giving to the less fortunate {we are so very lucky to have daddy. He provides us with not only the things we need but also with the things we want. Not everyone has that.}, taking care of the things that they still want by keeping them clean and organized {I don't know how many times we all have stepped on and broke things that they didn't put away so they ended up in the garbage}, and it's not all about quantity - I got rid of all the "filler" toys {stuff that doesn't get played with very often if at all} and I have made it EASY for my girls to keep their rooms and their playroom tidy. I think it is working because it has been a week and they have yet to absolutely wreck their play spaces and clean-up time takes only minutes instead of hours! I'm absolutely loving it, and so are they - no more days where cleaning up their toys seem endless.

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