THE YARD SALES

For those that have never experienced a "Military Move", let me give you a picture. If you are in the military, you will most likely be forced to move a few times over your career. You can do this yourself and get reimbursed for your trouble, but the easy way is to let the military do it for you. Doing it this way all you do is tell the moving office when you want to move and they will send a contracted moving company to your house to wrap up all of your stuff, put it into boxes, load it into the moving truck, take it to wherever you are moving to, store it for a while if needed, bring it to your new residence, unload the truck, put the furniture where you want it even if that means upstairs, and if you want them to they will even unpack everything for you. This is paid for by the military so you barely have to lift a finger, or have a moving sale before you move. That's right, you don't need to clean out the garage of all of those broken things you thought you might fix, get rid of the clothes that don't even fit, or even bother to get rid of that snow blower that will be extra useful now that you will be living below I-10. They will pack up everything and it will magically show up at your next place. This means that all of the junk you accumulated over the last several years, never gets it's normal purging that a move should do.


Wow we got a lot of junk. In fact I was over the moving weight limit last time we moved, that is usually set for a person my rank, but thankfully I didn't have to reimburse the military for what I was over. We needed to get rid of lots of stuff, most of which I didn't hardly remember I had and had just been stored in the attic cause it also didn't seem worth throwing away yet. We were living in a 2300ft, four bedroom house that was too big for us, but didn't seem crowded as there was plenty of space to put stuff. Now to figure out what we should keep and what to get rid of.


Over the next few months we went to work organizing everything. We owned the motor home so we pulled the drawers out and set them on the floors in the bedrooms and the kitchen. Once we saw what would fit we started living out of those drawers and some closet space that was close in size as to what we would have. We made the spare bedroom the "Going into Storage Room" and started organizing the keep sakes into bins and stacking them in there. The rest of the house became the sell pile. We even brought in the mattresses from the RV and slept on those on the floor so that the beds could be put into the sell pile. We brought the RV and parked it in front of the house for several days at different times so that I could organize the stuff that we wanted to keep in the storage bays of the RV and if we still needed it at the house until we finally moved in we would keep it too in the "Storage Room". The kids could see how much they could keep in the RV area's designated for them and then the rest went into the sell pile.


The sell pile was building up so large that we started selling some of the big items on Craigslist, as we thought we could get a better offer than from just a yard sale. When the time came that we thought we were ready to have a yard sale we had too much stuff to take it all to the front yard and the garage. We had yard sale for three weekends in a row on both Saturdays and Sundays. People even kept coming back the next weekends as during the week we would add more stuff to the pile or they thought they could get a better deal as the sale progressed. For the first two weekends the sale was all over the front lawn, in the garage and even in the house. A few last minute items like laundry machines and vacuums where promised out but thankfully we were allowed to keep until move out day. The men even loved our sale as it had lots of spare tools and yard equipment that I would put out front just to get them to stop. We lived in a cul-de-sac and I would even have to direct traffic sometimes as it just got too full with cars. I'm sure my neighbors were annoyed but hey they all got good deals on stuff.


We were selling to sell it off, and probably could have made more profit if we had a different situation. I hear that some people who do this have an estate type of auction where a company comes in and auctions off your stuff. That might have been a better idea but I'm not sure how well that would have worked as so much of our stuff was not high value, but really just a lot of $10 or less stuff. It was a lot of work though and we were always exhausted after a weekend, but thankfully we did make a fair amount of money just by the shear volume.


The whole experience really makes me look back on what we paid for most of what we had. I realize that at the time we bought whatever it was that it seemed like a good investment. It was hard to realize just how much money had gone down the drain when you see it go for pennies on the dollar and then wonder why I thought I really needed some of it. Personally I'm a tool guy. A mechanic, and a carpenter. I kept the tools that would allow me to have some income on the road and even my hand tools if I get back to mechanics, but I had so many tools that I bought for some project, and didn't see a need for anymore, but I just put myself at the back of the pack in the "He who dies with the most tools wins" race. But,,, it was also freeing too.


I was kinda glad to see it go. Sure I shudder at the thought that if I had to buy it all back it would cost a fortune, but I am definitely going to be looking harder at those purchases in the future. I liked having all of those things that I wasn't sure why I still had, or that I was going to get around to some day, just leave. I still kept plenty of stuff. My kids think I kept too many tools when I tell them they can't have more room in the RV for their toys or sports equipment. We still took two Ford Ranger size truck loads to the Good Will, and another one to the Recycler, and even the garbage pile was plenty high when we were done. I hope to never have that much useless stuff again.