Warmer Weather + Junk =

Spring has officially decided to stay and day by day it's getting warmer. With the combination of those two things and the deep seeded need in us to 'spring clean'...you know what that means...It's garage sale season!

I find it funny...here we are each spring, going through our closets and storage rooms, deciding what to sell, donate or simply get rid of and then we go off to buy stuff from other people who are trying to sell, donate or simply get rid of the stuff they've cleaned out. In the wake of 'cleaning out', it seems we just can't help but collect more. Garage sales truly prove that one man's garbage is another man's treasure!

And it's also funny if you have kids. They want to get in on the action too, so they go through their things and come out with a box mostly full of Happy Meal toys. They have grand dreams of buying PlayStation's and XBOX's with the riches they just know they're going to get and actually look at you confused and disappointed at the $2.50 you give them at the end of the day!

So, here I am today sitting at our own garage sale...have I mentioned that I HATE getting ready to DO a garage sale? The sorting, the folding, the pricing, the setting up, the tearing down...yeah, pretty much everything but the actual taking of other people's money. You see, it's NEVER a simple thing...you HAVE to go through every drawer, every closest and every box in your storage closet and look at each item and think...Hmm, I haven't seen this item in over 3 years and even tho it's sat unused in this box and up until now I've completely forgotten that I owned it, there MIGHT be a chance I might need it within the next 5 + years...Thank heavens Lisa and I are NOT like that...well, not to any extreme that is!

Now as I said, I'm sitting here at our own garage sale, typing this BLOG and watching people come and go between our neighbor's house and ours. Each year at this time our entire town does a city wide garage sale and people from all over the area come through. So far we've sold an old refrigerator, large dog kennel and our treadmill (so long New Years resolution!) and many other smaller items. I like to price items to move; I figure that if I took the time to sort through all of our CRAP, that means we don't want to keep it and it does me no good to spend this time just to put the stuff back into storage. The worst is this...putting stuff out to sell at your garage sale that you purchased from garage sales the year before...I have to admit that we're guilty of that!

One guy came up, said that he recently had a heart attack and needed the treadmill to help him in his recovery. So, I was happy to help him load the thing up in the back of his truck. Then there's the family who drove up with their black lab in the back seat. Sitting there with a stuffed teddy bear in his mouth...not chewing it mind you...just sitting there like it was his security blanket!

I'm thinking next time I'm just going to put a sign in the front yard stating 'Garage Sale, Knock On Door'. Then I'll have the 'Pickers' just go from room to room in our house and if they find something they like, they can ask and who knows...maybe I'll sell it!


~ V