Yard Sales or Garyard Sales

What is the difference in a yard sale and a garage sale? Is it that one is in the yard and one is in the garage? What if you have part of your stuff in the garage and part in the driveway? What kind of sale is it then? Ok, humor aside, we had our first yard sale a few weeks ago. This was an attempt to "purge" those small unnecessary items that you accumulate over 25 years. Finding these items is not hard, just stand in the middle of a room in your house and look around. You don't even have to move very much. They are there starring you in the face. You bought that little tidbit 10 years ago when you lived in another house or even another town. You kept it thinking you might use it again somewhere??? There it sits asking the age old question, "Why?"
Then you go to your closet. Wow! Now there is a dilemma. You have kept clothes in every size just in case you are that size again. You have kept clothes just in case they come back in style again . The problem is we now have houses with closets as large as bedrooms used to be. Do you remember when the average house on the market was only 2 bedrooms, 1 bath? Had maybe 1200 to 1500 square feet? Now the average house has 4 bedrooms, 3 baths and is anywhere from 2100 to 3000 square feet and that is the average. We won't even go into the increase in house prices. When I was growing up my closet was a small thing with a single door. We put our clothes up at the end of a season and got out the next season's clothes. At that time we went through them and if they didn't fit we handed them down and got something new (or new to us). It is so easy with the large, walk-in closets to just push those clothes to the back somewhere and keep them. The "old" days were so much more simple and made so much more sense. Hey, much like full-timing. We don't have room in our motorhome for tons of clothes so we keep only what we need and use. We store the seasonal stuff, like coats, in a tub in the basement. Some folks leave their seasonal clothes at a relative's house. The point is we don't keep it unless we use it.
In our house it seems we have been in the business of just acquiring more and more "stuff." One day we looked around and asked ourselves what we were doing. Do we need all of this? Hence, the yard sale. Full-timing makes you evaluate what is most important in your life. Do you need all of that "stuff" to be happy?
Notice I haven't mentioned the treasured items that really do have meaning and memories. What do we do with those items? Do they go into a yard sale also? Well, that is another post altogether and we will deal with emotion later.
In the meantime, we had the yard sale! It was quite an experience. We worked very hard, started work very early and made a little money. The important thing is that someone else now has a new treasure to add to their collection and to one day wonder, why???
It is true - "one man's trash is another man's treasure."