This Damn House

Given that this week, Big Brother/Big Sister failed to pick up the scheduled donation, and so all my giveaway items were still stacked in bags and boxes in front of my garage, I was enticed by several friends to do something I normally eschew: sell stuff at a yard sale.

So we loaded two cars up with all the boxes and down we went.

It was a big to-do, with five different families represented and hundreds if not thousands of items for sale (not to mention deeelicious fresh warm brownies). The day was stunningly perfect: blue skies and fuzzy-bunny clouds, a light cool breeze, and dry air atypical of August in New England. The kids alternated between helping out, playing in the yard, riding their scooters heart-stoppingly fast down the hill, and raiding the other families' stock.

A great time was had by all. As a social event, it was an unequivocal success! (Thanks for inviting us, Shayde and Omegabeth!)

As a means to get rid of stuff, it was an equivocal success; I managed to unload about a third of my items by number, and about half by volume.

As an efficient or economical way to get rid of stuff, it was a dismal failure. If you count the effort I put into boxing the items (although of course I had done that already), loading them into the car, unloading and setting up, sitting at the time, packing up the remainder and taking it home, the whole enterprise cost perhaps 7 hours, and netted us a whopping $20.

Twenty dollars! That comes out to about $2.86 an hour. That's less than my kids make raking leaves.

I think next time I get invited to a yard sale on a beautiful late August day, I will pick out my 5 or 10 most premium items as a token of participation in the event, sell them quick, and spend the rest of the day schmoozing, eating brownies and poking through my friends' castoffs.