The Stickiness of Stuff

~ Laura

I’m still in a mad domesticity mood. OK. OK. Poor Steve.

I’ve just sorted out the crap in the basement for an impromptu garage sale on Saturday. I don’t need a nickel for an old pot holder and five bucks for an IKEA desk. The garage sale is just the means of getting stuff out of my house. By charging money for the pot holder and the desk, I will con people into thinking that the stuff has value and then they will take it off my hands. That’s the theory anyway.

Some of this stuff is garbage that moved with us from New York City. We didn’t know how to get rid of it there, so we just moved it with us to New Jersey. Smart, huh? The trouble is that it’s hard to get rid of stuff in New Jersey, too. There are these mysterious garbage rules that after two years, we still don’t really understand. Thursdays is household garbage day, which means you can leave slightly bigger, heavier stuff for the guys to haul away. What is the big and heavy limit? Those rules are rather vague. I believe that much of it depends on whether or not their wives were nice to garbage dudes the night before. Today, we dragged an old screen door to the curb with a prayer and they took it. Hurrah. The guys were serviced, and we were serviced.

I’m unsure about how well this garage sale is going to work out. I haven’t advertised for it, but we’ll make big signs for the busy road at our corner. Also, much of the stuff that we’re hocking will the kids’ old toys and stuffed animals. The kids will be here. I’m going to pull Winnie the Pooh out of a garage bag where it’s been hiding for two years and tears will come to a small child’s eyes. “Oh, there you are, Pooh!” It’s all so predictable.

We’re also trying to purge five boxes of stuffy old books from grad school. We really don’t need two copies of Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic, but I’m not sure that our neighbors want to bone up on the impact of Calvinism on capitalism.

Then there’s just the unwieldy crap, like 5 old air conditioners. (Toni, these babies are way too heavy to carry up a city apartment. You really don’t want them. They have new light ones for $100 at Lowe’s.) I don’t think the garbage dudes will take it even if they all received lap dances the night before.

The last problem is my husband who has that squirrelly storage instinct. The air conditioners still work, so he doesn’t want to dispose of them, because … I don’t know why. I can’t in good conscience even give them to a friend. So, he’s going to be pouting and moping about when all the stuff that doesn’t sell gets put in a dumpster.

Please take our stuff.

Published by Laura

12 thoughts on “The Stickiness of Stuff”

  1. So, you don’t know about Craigslist? Every news paper in the land is whining about the loss of their classified ad money flow, the New York Times is going to stop providing the Official National Version of Events because of Craigslist, and you are still holding a garage sale? How twentieth century of you!

    Like

  2. You can overcome a lack of previous night’s service with a little cash, usually.
    We remodeled the bathroom in our old townhouse, and had some large construction debris. We did it ourselves, so there was no contractor to haul the debris. It wasn’t enough stuff to justify a dumpster (not to mention the fact that the condo association gave me a hard time about the dumpster we had when we gutted the kitchen, even though the dumpster was delivered on a Friday and removed the following Monday). I waited at the window on Saturday morning until I saw the garbage truck pull in. Then I ran out and told the guys that I had a few things in the garage I was wondering if they could take, and offered them each a $10 tip. Then the old sink, the nasty old toilet, and the old countertop magically vanished. šŸ˜‰
    Of course, that was NY suburbs–the hauling company had an Italian name stenciled on the sides of its trucks, naturally. I’m not sure I’d try that here in squeaky clean MD.

    Like

  4. Craigslist is good, as is Freecycle (a yahoo group, I think). But a garage sale worked for me: instead of paying someone to haul stuff to the dump, people paid me and then took my stuff away!

    Like

  6. Oh, man, I could have written this post, although not having a house at the moment, perhaps with slightly less stuff. We have a storage space (somewhat) full of stuff we moved from Rural Utopia to here, and now that I’m leaving here, we figure if we didn’t use it for three years, we don’t need it now. I just wish we could leave it in the storage space and make it magically disappear… I have to look into craigslist and freecycle. Please, someone take my stuff! We have nice stuff, I promise, just too much of it!

    Like

  7. We’ve been frecycling away both the crap that the previous owner of the house left us, and the crap that we’ve had in storage that now that we’re trying to find a place for, we’re wondering why we ever kept it.
    Our big score of the week was that someone came and *took apart* the huge 70’s era bar that was in the basement. (And we’re not talking peg and hole construction here — it was solid.) T thought we were going to have to pay someone to take it away…

    Like

  8. We had a massive, fairly successful yard sale just before our move from Illinois to Kansas. Freecycle and Craiglist and the others are good, but they assume a certain amount of particular care about what is you do or do not want to get rid of and/or buy. When all you’re doing is purging, yard sales are great. You just shove everything out there onto the sidewalk and driveway, and if you’ve advertised properly, you can bargain near everything away. And then, best of all: once we’d sold everything we could sell, we threw the rest away, confident that we had given our dues to The Invisible Hand of the Market and nothing else was required of us, and escaped from 13 years of stuff guilt free. Oh frabjous day!

    Like

  9. Just don’t tell your mom or all the toys you don’t sell will end up at our house!

    Like

  10. I heard a great line on an Oprah show about clutter that you can use on your husband. Squirrelling and hoarding, said the clutter expert, is all about living in the past and fearing the future. You keep stuff around to hang on to the past and because you are worried about what you might possibly need in the future. Hoarders are trying to hold onto the past and fear the future.
    But having all the crap around means you are living in the past and the future and makes it impossible for you to happily live in the present.
    So forget the past and forget the future and make your present more tolerable. Get rid of the crap.
    When I hesitate to throw out, I give myself that little lecture.

    Like

  11. Gotta luv Oprah. Steve, are you reading this? Cut and paste that comment to your mom. Judging from your mom’s kitchen counters, 1979 was a good year for her.
    SIL, I want you to sift through stuff on Friday. There’s a perfectly good rocking horse. Julia will looooove it. BTW, it’s 5:00 here tomorrow for pasta and salad. It has to be simple, because I’ll be at school all day tomorrow. Watching Ian and making dinner has become mutally exclusive lately, but I can handle boiling water.
    Toni, come on down! But come on a Saturday when Steve’s around, so I can do better than pasta and sauce from a jar.
    Russell, you’ve given me hope. Let’s see if we can get people to cart away our trash for us with the garage sale con.
    If not, I’ll be paying off the garbage dudes. Craigslist is just too much work for me right now.

    Like

Comments are closed.