Garage Sale Hell

Jill's Journal: A lot of people love a good garage sale. God bless ‘em. I’m not one of them. The only thing that sounds worse to me than attending a garage sale is actually hosting one. For years, I’d pack up anything that needed to be discarded by our household (but might be useful to someone else) and happily donate it to Goodwill or some other organization. But with the large volume of possessions we’ve needed to disperse in the last few months, we’ve now had a few garage sales and planned for one last big one yesterday.

I braced myself to get through this grand finale, but when it poured rain until sunrise and left us with a soggy lawn, we decided to take advantage of our later closing date and shift it to next Saturday instead. So, yesterday we just set out a few tables of saleable items while we cleaned the garage.

If having a garage sale is a small piece of torture for me, here’s where my own personal hell comes in. A group of Jehovah’s Witnesses showed up and wouldn’t leave. I’m all for people sharing their faith, but these people were aggressive and intrusive…and somehow ended up inside my house. NINE of them. INSIDE my home.

We treat our house as our own private little sanctuary from the world and it can be hard for me sometimes to have people I like inside my home, so having a group of strangers that I was already uncomfortable with invade my house made me crazy. And it was like herding cats. I’d make a push to get them out the door and they’d push right back. It was like they’d staked their claim and weren’t going to budge.

When a few of them stepped in between me and the children, I got very anxious. When Victoria started crying, I’d had it. Mama Bear came out. I told them in no uncertain terms that they had to get out and get out now. Rob was outside trying to deal with legitimate customers and he said every single one of them apologized to him as they filed out.

I had to laugh about it when it was over because I’ve somehow turned into my Mother. When I was young, we used to live in a neighborhood where Jehovah’s Witnesses paid very regular visits. My Mom must have spent hours politely trying to get rid of them and one time, out of frustration, called the pastor of our church to come over and help her deal with them. But they still came back. My Mom hated those knocks on our door and when she saw them coming, she finally started hiding all of us in a back bedroom until they stopped knocking and went away!

I used to think that was so funny – why not just tell them you’re not interested and stop letting them waste your time? But they got me this week. If they come back, I might lock the door and hide in a bedroom too...

It’s Really Happening!

Jill's Journal: The past two weeks have been a flurry of activity as we depersonalize the house and prepare it for market. It’s always been neat and tidy, but we’re going the extra mile to make sure it stands out when we hang that “For Sale” sign out front. It’s incredibly exciting to see progress and realize that our “launch date” is a mere two months away!

Another successful garage sale is in the books, more big items have been sold on Craig’s List, and charities ranging from All God’s Children to Blue Grass Farms Charities to Goodwill have been blessed with boxes upon boxes of donations.

We’ve also “bought” a mailbox at a place that will enable us to keep our Kentucky residency for now and has a professional mail forwarding service to boot. We’ve made decisions on online banking for the road. And perhaps most significantly, we’ve rented a small storage unit and began moving in the boxes I’ve packed of sentimental and significant items we’re saving.

Somehow, that made it all real to me. Not buying the fifth wheel or the big truck to pull it. Not the mountain of preparations we’ve been making for months and months. Not the hours of planning and dreaming and discussing we’ve done for the last 1 1/2 years. Nope. It was the storage unit; such a minor little step along the way, yet when we scaled it, it hit me. It really hit me. We’re doing this. It’s really happening!

First Garage Sale!

Jill's Journal: Last week we had our first official garage sale. Naturally, it was the coldest day of the season…we went from a delightfully sunny autumn to arctic conditions overnight, but it was a resounding success nonetheless. We bundled up against the cold and, with the wonderful help of Kristi and Adam, parted with hundreds of small items and a few bigger ones. It took hours to put everything out – I had been cleaning out closets and drawers and old boxes for a few weeks and the pile in the garage was daunting. And absolutely nothing was valuable! But we had great fun, made $487 from a bunch of junk we hadn’t used in ages anyway (and won’t miss), and it felt FANTASTIC to get some things out of the house.

One might think our house might be feeling a bit sparse, but that’s not the case at all. The drawers and cupboards and closets are all a bit lighter, but nothing big is gone yet. We're still planning to live here for approximately six more months, so I can’t do anything too drastic yet!

At the end of the garage sale, I threw most of the smaller stuff still left into big garbage bags and both Kristi and I made a trip to Goodwill. And some of the big stuff that really wasn't sellable afterward -- like old lights, an old dining room table that Rob used for poker at the office, a beat-up Christmas tree stand, etc. -- we put at the end of our driveway with a "Free" sign on it. It was all gone in no time! It amazes me what people are willing to take.

I also found a home this week for more than 1,000 issues of The Blood-Horse magazine that I had been saving for a future home library. That was hard for me to do -- I'd written in a few hundred of them, but I couldn't keep them. They took up 17 big, heavy boxes and had to go. That was bittersweet.

I still have a lot of work to do. This was just a dent, but a good dent. :-) We’re definitely moving in the right direction.