Best wishes with your sale -- I wanted to pass on my experience and give you one more option for the future, as you work through this challenge. We too had a garage sale to clear out some of our own clutter and the clutter that had gathered from various deceased parents' households over the year. We had help, but it was lots of work and physical work, just getting the thing set up. The decisions eventually were not too hard, since we were energized and committed to trying hard to clear out.
But, after all of that, we made only a little money, and were exhausted at the end of the day. We did schedule a charity truck to pick up the excess - that had mixed success -- came too early the day of the sale, was nice enough to come back a bit later; but we still had to have to them come back another day while we packed up again all of the leftovers on the sale tables -- they just weren't ready for the truck yet.
So the pulling out of the items to the driveway, repacking of the unsold items for the truck, the dirt and muscle strain, the modest sales, the cost of renting tables ( low, but we still had a lot of tables), making signs for street advertising, all the other tasks: we decided this was our last sale -- that the money coming in was not worth the physical toll. Any future clearouts will go directly to the charity truck, happily.
But I guess you could say it was a good experience because it taught us never to undertake it again. If you can learn from this, my hope for you and others is that if you skip the garage sale, do so without any guilt or regret -- just get the stuff out of the house, now. You will have accomplished your most important goal. Unless you are very lucky or you don't mind all of the steps and work that I have described, it may be a disappointing effort. Keep focused on what is most important - toss and clear!
People have since complimented our cleared out living room and tv room -- we just hadn't noticed the boxes and piles over the years -- so, we had a good result and hope that you do too.
I think many of us are in the same boat regarding clutter. As a first step I am having a two weekend garage sale. I can not handle doing it myself and have found 2 friends who are running the garage sale for me. I offered them a respectable percentage of the amount brought in. They are going to set it up, tag and price everything and be there. I just have to bring everything out into the garage and of course I will be there during the sale most of the time. I won't have to price things. I think that is where we clutterers get into trouble. We feel everything we own has value or that we will use it "someday." Thanks for the website suggestion. I'll check it out too.
My parents were real hoarders. I must tackle their house but feel I can't do it until my own house is in order. DH and I would like to move to a retirement location in about 2 years but certainly can't take all this stuff with us. Thanks to TUG and all we have learned about timesharing we now know there is a whole lot of traveling we want to do.
