Cleaning up...

It looks like we are going to sell our house. It was always one of those financially questionable decisions in the first place, and money's really tight right now. So, we're putting our house on the market.

Our realtor seems pretty positive, thinks that we'll get some equity out of it. But he walked the house with us over the weekend, and showed us what things we could do to make it look as nice as possible for the open house and market. Funny guy, he didn't want to "tell" us what to do, but he kept saying "so,...,are you going to take away that table/cabinet/chair/couch, etc.?" and "so,....are you going to have it cleaned and clean the windows?"

The long and the short of it is that 3/4 of our furniture and belongings needs to magically be beamed up to some netherworld while our house is on the market. Some things are important to us and we know that we'll want them when we get wherever we're going next. But a lot of our things have been dragged along with us from California to Texas and now to Washington DC. And some things we haven't even liked for years.

So we're doing some serious selling and clearing. We already had a garage sale. I've done some Ebay selling before, with some luck. But lots of things haven't sold on Ebay, and you pay for every listing either way, and wait and wait for it to not sell. And we're just a bit upset at our Goodwill right now (meaning, way totally upset), so that's out. Plus we're Jewish so we don't usually give to the Salvation Army. So what to do?

Well, we posted a lot of things on Craig's List. Wow, I'm amazed at what an efficient world this is becoming! We posted things in the morning and they were gone by the end of the day, for decent prices!! And it's free to post, even with pictures! What a great system.

Then, for the things that we didn't think would be worth posting on Craig's list, we posted those to our local freecycle group, and those went even faster. Sometimes we use the phrase "that's so ugly, I couldn't even give that away!" Well, it's just not true. It turns out you can give most anything away. I saw chunks of wood, broken vacuums, dirty clothes, moving boxes and so much more. We picked up some moving boxes from one person and gave away clothes and extra holiday decorations to others. What a resourceful world we live in!!