The Uncarved Blog

For the past couple of days, Ben and I have been preparing for a garage sale this weekend. Why on earth, you might be asking, would you decide to go to all the trouble of putting on a garage sale when you have a ton of packing, cleaning, and moving to do in the next couple of weeks. After spending the last couple of days sorting, folding, and pricing grimy furniture and old clothing in 90+ degree heat, my answer is: good question.

But actually, we have good reason for doing this. Although we have been giving away (and throwing away) a lot of stuff in the past couple months, we still have to store the stuff we plan to keep somewhere. For us, that somewhere is in a storage container on my parents’ farm. Basically, it’s the box from a moving truck, just sitting on their property, next to their barn. It’s weather-proof, roomy, and free, so it’s perfect for storing all the stuff we have deemed keep-worthy.

The problem with this box is that it has been full of my grandmother’s stuff for the past four years or so. It’s a long story, but because my grandma moved from a big house into a little apartment on my parents’ property, and because she did it very quickly, she brought a lot of stuff with her–some of it nice and worth keeping (or selling), and some of it (quite a lot of it, we discovered) just junk that was never sorted through when she moved. Our job for the past couple of days has been to sort out the keepable stuff from the sellable and discardable stuff. The result was that we nearly emptied the box, we have a ton of stuff to sell, and there’s now plenty of room to store our stuff for the next year.

The hard work is mostly done; pretty much all that’s left is to sell the stuff. So, Ben and I will be doing that for the next couple of days. I’m not really looking forward to it–the weather forecast says it will be hot and humid (and possibly a little rainy) for the next couple of days. I have to say, even if I didn’t have a ton of work to do in my own apartment, spending eight hours in that kind of heat still wouldn’t be the  most appealing thing in the world. But it’s definitely worth not having to rent a storage container for all our stuff for the next year.