Since we had thoughts early on about the potential to move at some point in the future, we'd started to "clean up" around the house and yard in 2020, deciding to sell some of the things that were seldom (never) being used. That turned into a deep purge of the yard, garage, basement and house.
We quickly had an immersion into the world of Craigslist and Facebook Marketplace, learning how much we could sell...and just how easy it is!
At first it was somewhat intimidating, thinking that people may not see the value in what we were ready to part with. We found out how wrong we were, as many items sold the same day we listed them!
It’s not to say that the decision making about what to sell was easy. There were several “throw-downs“ between us as we challenged the other about why they needed to keep a particular item. Logic wasn't always the prevailing theme in these "vibrant discussions", but in the end it was healthy dialog that let us find plenty of things that clearly had outlived their usefulness.
We also learned that we could write an extensive documentary about the human condition based on how people responding to online listings behave - some positive and many disappointingly negative.
It did actually end up being really rewarding to simultaneously rid ourselves of the weight from all the extra stuff we had around, and make some money in the process.
The cleansing wasn’t all rainbows and ponies though - we had several painful trips to the transfer station and Goodwill to say "goodbye" to things that we saw value in but that other people didn't.
We were glad that we started early in handling this, since it took some time to sift through what we had, organize into keep/sell/toss, post online and work through the sales process.
In the end we had nearly 200 postings of items we were selling that ranged from tea cups to tent trailers to cars, and everything in between...with some amazing surprises about what we were able to sell! We'd guess that we've likely sold over $20k if we counted everything, which surprised us when we realized that was all stuff just hanging around us that we didn't use/need/want.
While the extra money was great to have, our motivation was move driven by "getting light" and cutting down the things that we had to move. We've culled a lot, but are concerned that we haven't cut deep enough yet. Anybody want a cooler? How about a road bike? Maybe a generator?
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