Everything Must Go!

After giving up on the yard sale we decided to try Craig's List instead. We sold all the big stuff for more than we were asking at the yard sale, so perhaps that made up for all the stuff that just went to the thrift store. The table and chairs were stuck out in the rain and looked terrible, so I tried putting them on Freecycle. A couple of people inquired, but no one came by. After a while, out came the sun and dried up all the rain and the dining room set didn't look so bad anymore. We put it on Craig's List for $30 and had to fend off the deluge of inquiries.

I think the moral of that story is that people think that free stuff is junk, but cheap stuff is a bargain.

With all the big stuff gone, we now must deal with the little stuff that is left, and deal with it in a house nearly bereft of surfaces out of reach of the twins. It goes, but slowly. Today I cleaned out the vitamin and candy cupboard. (We keep them together, perhaps in hopes of them neutralizing each other.) By clearing out the cupboards I should have room to put the things that now live on top of the refrigerator. Everything has to move around to somewhere else, where something else is in the way, or be sorted or given back to someone or something. So everywhere is getting cleaner, but nowhere is clean.

There are two basic types of housekeeping activities: tidying and cleaning. These two are not only not the same, they are antithetical. I'm a tidier. Give me a messy room and permission to hide, and I can have it looking . . . unobjectionable . . . in a matter of minutes. Sooner or later, though, all those hiding places come back to bite you. Hence, one must clean, and that makes a terrible mess.

It's a motivator for getting rid of things. Everything that goes out the front door is something I never have to pick up again.

Things seem to be moving agonizingly slowly. This is already the longest we've ever spent on moving. Of course, in all our previous moves, we've just dumped stuff in the nearest boxes and figured it would all turn up eventually. When and if we ever do get the house sold (we're STILL trying to figure out what is going on with that title issue, but the world seems full of incompetent people right now), actually moving is going to be a minor task in comparison.