Garage sale....Another way to let go

Getting rid of stuff......

The minute that you make the decision to move, the amount of stuff you own suddenly seems to loom large. I am not sure if it is a quantum effect or not, but it is as if everything you own suddenly becomes heavy and cluttered. Maybe it is the decision to move that allows for a change in you point of view regarding the stuff that you own, but I can tell you it happens every time we move. In fact, it is clear to me that the the time line for a move is as follows.

9:00:00 AM Hey we really are about to move

9:00:01 AM My god we have to have a garage sale

So we have been engaged in the process of selling our stuff to folks who need it more than we do. The first garage sale was wild, and a little hectic.

You see, since we live in the middle of nowhere (as far as a garage sale is concerned) we needed to someone to host our garage sale. We needed someone who was having a garage sale and did not mind if a few squatters showed up to sell their stuff. Well as luck would have it, a co-worker was preparing for a garage sale in her neighborhood and in fact it was a neighborhood garage sale that they had every year. What a deal, we could tag along with a huge garage sale. The ads were already placed and so we were fired up and ready to sell our stuff. After speaking with some friends and borrowing a few folding tables we were ready to go.

My God how early did these people get up?
Now, when would you think people would show up for a garage sale? Roughly 7 am or so right? Well you would be one hour late if you through that, and so we got there at 6 am to lay stuff out and at 6:15 the old ones got out of their cars, armed with their flashlights and a keen sense of haggling, setting upon us in a frenzied buying spree.

It was insane, stuff was flying off the tables like crazy, people were making offers on thing that we had not had a chance to price. By the time the sun was up, 50% of the stuff belonged tp someone else. Things lagged for a bit and then the more sensible folks started arriving and they cleared out a lot more stuff, not all of it but pretty close. The things that did not sell were dropped at a charity garage sale on the way home so we felt pretty good when we got back home. It was neat to see the space in the house that suddenly showed up in the house once we started clearing things out.

Do you have anything to declare?
We felt pretty good about the sale, and though that we were doing really good until I learned a little something about taking your stuff across a border. It turns out that in order to successfully move your stuff across the border you have to declare everything that you are taking. Now that seems simple enough until you look at what they mean by declaring everything. They want us to list everything that we bring with us to Canada. Think about it for a moment, they mean everything...........

Well that puts things into a different perspective. I mean, do we really want this thing enough to list it on our manifest and estimate its value?

Suddenly there are so many things that we no longer need. Nancy got a whole new outlook on the personal effects and we have decided that we need to get rid of as much stuff as we possibly can. This means that we are returning things to family from whence they came, selling things that we have not used in over a year, and seriously looking at everything else. We have a garage sale scheduled for the coming weekend and another for April. Whatever is left will be going to the Belton Masonic Lodge garage sale in the spring. It is my sincere hope that we can fit everything that we are taking into a 24 foot U-Haul truck.

What about the horses?

Well, that is another story all together. We certainly have to sell a few horses in order to make the move. We have moved a few to new homes at this point, and we have a few more to move to make things easy. We sold Frankie to a nice lady from Georgetown who is using him to ride big trails all over the United States. She bought him on a Tuesday and had him out into a canyon on Friday.

The mini, Taunta, went to a family in west Bell county. Turns out it is the mother to one of my first OB-Gyn patients as a staff doctor and I had know of her love for minis for some time but just not put things together. Apparently she and Taunta are very happy together since Taunta reminds her of a horse she loved from a movie in her childhood and so she very much loves having Taunta in her barn.

This leaves us with a few more that need to find good homes. Buddy, the driving pony that Nancy has bee working with for the last year is not going to go with us to Canada. He is going back to Tom O'Carroll's Driving Center from whom we originally purchased him. We are selling the tack and the carriage that we have as well since they will not be needed once the horse is sold. It is not that Nancy will no longer be driving when she gets to Canada, she will likely be doing a different kind of driving when we get there. She is not so interested in doing the combined driving that she was doing with Tom, she is much more interested in pleasure driving and so we will likely get a completely different horse and carriage combination once we get settled into out new place.

The other horse that we absolutely have to sell is Bronte. She has proved a bit harder to move on down the line. She is an Appaloosa Arab cross and a mare which has combined to make her less desirable for folks. We have had her for sale off and on for 6 months and have only had a couple of people look at her and may be twice that many who have contacted us about her. It is as if people do not want a mare, rather they want a gelding. I am not sure why, but is is what seems to be occurring. Anyway we hope to sell her soon to someone, and if no one steps up, then we will take her to a reputable auction and sell her for whatever we get for her.

We have four horses left once we sell these two, and I am not sure if they will all move with us. Certainly we are taking Olivia and Cowboy, but hopefully we will sell Ophelia prior to the move, but the price is set in stone. She has been listed for a while and we have yet to hear from anyone about her. As for Aubry, he is likely to move with us, but it is not set in stone. He has been having quiet a bit of arthritis and the vets are telling us that he probably not do well with the cold, and he will certainly not be able to get out to pasture for several months of the year. Being stall bound 90% of the time from December through April will probably accelerate his arthritis.

I can't believe you are getting rid of all of that.......

So there it is, the long and the short of getting rid of our stuff. The reaction that people have to the very act of getting rid of all our stuff is fairly interesting. The group splits along the lines of folks who cannot imagine selling their stuff no matter what, and those who see it as replaceable junk that you can get more or less anywhere. I am very much in the later of these two groups since I do not have any problem selling everything that I do not absolutely need daily. I would be happy to have sold all the furniture so that the only thing we take with us is a bed. Nancy is a little more refined in her ideas about clearing things out, and she is happy to part with many things, but not the family treasures. I will be curious to see what we are left with when it is all said and done.

That is for now, more as things progress.......