To Bring or Not to Bring

When you move, you realize that you have accumulated items that you never use yet find it impossible to part with. This was my trouble as we start to plan our packing. What to bring and what not to bring: the question of the day. The second question is how to get rid of these things. We could donate them, but once we saw the sheer volume of stuff we have, we would have to rent a U-Haul just to make the trip to Goodwill. We looked in to having an estate sale, but we didn't have enough to make the 30% commission they wanted worthwhile. The last resort - a yard sale.

Looking at the calendar, our weekends are starting to get numbered, so we had to act relatively quickly. I picked July 3rd for the date. I had a feeling it would be either very busy or no one would show up, but for the peace of mind of getting it done I would take the chance. Not only did I bring Larry along for this ride, but his parents as well. Frank and Jan were great sports about it, came for the weekend and even brought a folding table!

In an effort to get more people to the yard sale, I put an announcement on the Community section of Craig's List. I did this late on the Thursday night before the sale and inadvertently left out the address. Well, I figured people would know that there was a moving sale in Ozona at least. It is a small town...

Friday night after dinner we started going through everything: the closet under the stairs (so full that I called the the "closet of which we will not speak!"), the pantry, the hutch, cabinets, closets - everywhere we store things. We even took some things off the walls! I found things that I had not touched in years, but for some reason felt a twinge of nostalgia. It went something like - oh, here's my pineapple corer. Do they have pineapple in Australia? Maybe we'll use it... Should we keep it? In the pile it went. By the time we went to bed we had covered the entire dining room table and part of the living room floor. This did not include the pile that I had already created in the garage.

The coffee maker went off at 6:00 AM the morning of the sale. We groggily got out of bed to go set everything up. We had the folding table, the dining room table (it is for sale too), the table from the patio and some garage shelves all set up with items. There were also boxes, crates and storage boxes full of things - remember our Christmas lights are not compatible! The four of us got everything set up by 7:30 (Craig's List ad said starting at 8:00). We sat down in our camp chairs to wait for customers.

After two "early birds" who browsed and bought nothing, there were no customers. We sat, sat and sat, took turns eating breakfast, sat and sat some more. The weather was holding off, yet cloudy. The temperature was quite moderate and I enjoyed watching the woodpecker parents come and go from the camphor tree in our front yard feeding the new babies. BUT WE WEREN'T SELLING ANYTHING!!! I kept dreading having to lug all of our stuff back in the house.

At around 9:30 when we had a few trickles, but not much steady business, I finally took a sign down to the main road. I think it was coincidence but after that we seemed to have a few spurts of business. Things even got steady once the sun came out for a spell. Things were selling and we were making a little fun money.

It got to be around noon and as I had ordered mussels for dinner, we needed to go collect them. I sent Larry to the meat market and off he went with his dad to find mussels, bread and fennel root. So Jan and I tended the sale and with a few more customers, amidst the thunder of the ever darker growing sky, and we beat the record of our previous sale (the one where I just opened the garage door and set everything on the ground in the driveway)!! Then the skies opened up and it started to pour!!

It was everything we could do to get all of the items back into the garage. Larry and Frank showed up just after the rain started and we managed to get everything in and dried off no worse for the wear. The funniest thing is that we still had customers after we brought everything inside!! People pulled up, got out of their cars and dogged the raindrops to shimmy between stacks of things on our tiny one car garage!

All in all I consider the day a success. It was hard to see some of the items go, but it will be even more fun to set up our new house once we get to Perth. Now it is time to focus on packing.



Oh, here is what the garage looks like. If you see anything you would like to buy, let me know!!:-)