It’s gotta happen this year
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By STEVE BATIE / Lee Newspapers
Tuesday, February 12, 2008 3:48 PM CST
LINCOLN, Neb. — I swear I’m gonna do it this spring.
I’m gonna have a garage sale.
I was planning one a couple of years ago, but when the house-painting project went into its second month (it topped out at 10 weeks), I decided to chuck it.
Much the same thing happened last year.
I was all set to devote my annual spring vacation week to a garage sale, but at the time I was only half-way through the front-yard retaining wall project and hadn’t been able to get the car out of the garage for a month.
Darned hard to have a garage sale with a garage full of car.
But I swear I’m going to do it this year.
I’m going to drag all that stuff up from the basement and in from the shop, stick price tags on it and stack it on tables, then spend a weekend in the full-blown entrepreneurial mode that I so love.
Other people, I know, dread the thought of running a garage sale.
They hate the idea of cleaning out closets and drawers, making street-pole signs, placing classified ads, having all manner of unsavory bargain hunters pawing through their old board games, paperbacks and too-tight clothes.
Not me.
I revel in it.
It appeals to my frugal (some would say cheap) nature to think that my personal cast-offs (let’s be fair … crap) would be valuable enough that some stranger might part with a buck or two to own them.
Just a year before I moved into the new-new house, I had a massive garage sale.
I had all this leftovers-from-the-divorce stuff clogging my life (and attic), you see. Besides, I knew I’d be getting a new place eventually, and I figured I’d be better off to lighten the load than to pack it all.
Not only did I bring in a few hundred dollars, but I gave away an even bigger tax-deductible pile to assorted charities.
The rest moved with me.
I always have things left after garage sales that seem too valuable to throw away or give away, even though I personally no longer have any use for them.
So I tuck them away until the next sale — sort of like the starter that bakers use to make sour-dough bread.
At the new-new house that starter occupies a closet in the basement bedroom, as well as a corner of the garage (and some rafter space), a section in the workbench cabinets in the shop and a couple of boxes in the den.
As useless stuff presents itself to me through the year, rather than dump it into the trash, I do a quick evaluation and squirrel away anything I think might be marketable.
To someone.
That’s how I currently happen to be storing a hand-made (by some kid in a shop class, I’m sure) fishing rod rack, 1970s croquet and horseshoes sets, one well-used fertilizer spreader, half a dozen telephones in assorted states of disrepair, an array of duplicate garden and woodworking tools and a lot of Christmas decor that no longer fits my lifestyle.
As a matter of fact, it was when I was putting away my still-in-use Christmas decor back in January that I noticed the garage sale stuff was starting to spill out of that basement bedroom closet and into the basement bedroom itself. It threatens to spread into the utility room next door.
So this spring I’m gonna have a garage sale.
Unless something comes along to get in the way.
Send your home repair and remodeling questions to: HouseWorks, P.O. Box 81609, Lincoln, NE 68501, or e-mail: houseworks@journalstar.com.
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