Finance Gets Personal

Our garage sale was last weekend, and while I was hoping to make $500 for our home theater system, we ended up slightly short of that goal with a profit of $380.

That’s an improvement from last year’s $240, but with all the new drugstore items I was selling, I thought I could do better. However, I did end up making another $50 on eBay by selling some of my rare Hard Rock Cafe shot glasses, and still have a keyboard and amp that didn’t sell that I need to re-list on Craigslist.

The weather was cold in the morning (I had on my fall coat and sat inside the garage), which kept most shoppers away until noon. While we might have ended up with the same number of visitors as last year, it felt like a lot less because they came throughout the day, instead of just nonstop from 7:30-1:00.

We had a lot of help from family members this year, which was nice! By including their items in our sale as well, we probably had one of the largest garage sales in the subdivision. Having two to three people at the “checkout” made it easy to keep track of whose items had sold (I asked them to put initials on their price stickers).

Besides being cold, it was also extremely windy! We had a lot of clothes for sale, but they we hardly even touched because the wind kept blowing them off the tables and we weren’t able to keep them very organized because of it. We also had some small item casualties and an incident involving a box of Pokemon cards being chased down the street.

While the whole ordeal was a pain, I really do think it was easier the second time around. This time, I made sure to order pizza the day before and schedule delivery for noon the day of the garage sale. I also called the local battered women’s shelter to arrange a pickup for all the leftover items the following Monday morning, which kept all that leftover stuff from sitting in the garage for months.

While I’m glad it’s all over, we’re still planning on having another sale during the next neighborhood event in August. Because I’ll definitely have more stuff to sell as I finish up The Cure!

Photo Credit: Garage Sale by lantzilla, used under Creative Commons licensing

for a Garage Sale!

As you might have guessed by the lack of posts this week, I have not worked on the office for Week 5 of The Cure. Instead, I’ve been busy getting ready for our garage sale on Saturday.

Last year we made about $240 in our garage sale, and this time (with the help of my CVS/Walgreens stockpile) I’m hoping to crack $500, which will go toward this home theatre system for the basement.

I cleaned out what was left of my old bedroom at my parents’ house, and also have a bunch of stuff to sell that was moved out of the basement when my husband started finishing it. Now I just need to finish labeling a couple boxes of stuff, make signs, find my banker’s bag, ice up some drinks and set everything up in the garage so it’s ready to go Saturday morning! Oh, and hope that it doesn’t rain…

Note to Self: In the future, it would be much easier to put things in a big “garage sale” bin as you clean the house and price them right then and there.

Since my house is now once again a disaster (I’ve really been trying to keep the rooms I’ve done so far clean, though) I’m eager to get back to the cure after this weekend is over.

I’m currently working on Apartment Therapy’s Eight-Step Spring Cure, which is an eight week process for making your home more organized, beautiful and healthy. I’ve been apprehensive about how much “curing” is going to cost, so I’m sharing my progress on trying to cure on a budget.

I am sweating my butt off thanks to extensive vacuuming combined with our refusal to turn on the A/C until it reaches 80 degrees outside. But, the living room is clean!

These are the assignments for Week 4:

• Clean up living room and related closets
• Repairs are being taken care of this week
• Declutter all books and media
• Cancel 75 percent of catalogs you receive
• Empty Outbox this week
• Confirm what you need to increase or decrease color in each room
• Identify what you need to increase or decrease softness in each room
• Cook three meals at home this week
• Send out your invitations

Somehow, our living room is the dirtiest room in the house. I suppose it’s because we spend the most time there, my husband eats his lunch on the couch when he works from home and because the doggie door leads into that room. It took a long time, but I washed the walls, cleaned the baseboards, vacuumed the couches, cleaned the fan blades and even fixed the massive tangle of cords behind the TV. I bought the following: Cord organizer ties (3 packages at $3.19 each at Target), a bamboo box to store PS3 games ($12.99 at Target) and a fabric-covered box to store PS3 cords and controllers (on clearance for $11.94 at Target).

I honestly haven’t made much progress on the repairs this week. Theoretically, I would be having someone “take care” of them this week and next week, but I can’t afford it without using some of my extra debt payment. I did replace another light bulb though

Decluttering books and media is a daunting task. I like the idea of getting rid of my CD collection and keeping them all on my hard drive/iPod, but my electronic organization system is chaos right now (for example, I’ve never even backed up this blog, nor do I really know how). My iPod is set up for a Mac, but I use a PC now (the Mac with all the music saved on it is in my stepson’s room). Once my husband gets his new computer, I plan on consolidating all my files there. As far as DVDs go, I am not allowed to get rid of any. My books are already heavily pared down from last year’s garage sale, and I don’t tend to be much of a book collector anyway. I do plan on going through these three categories for obvious “duds” sometime before our garage sale on the 16th.

Canceling 75% of catalogs you receive is something I may do in the future, but don’t have time for right now. In fact, I’ve done little besides clean the living room this week since I’ve been helping my husband plan the details of the basement layout (he took off work this week to do the framing). Trust me though, I’d rather be cleaning and organizing than drawing a bathroom and its fixtures to scale.

I’ll be emptying the outbox next weekend at my garage sale. I’m going to start pricing and organizing my items for the garage sale this week, and list some of the more expensive items on craigslist and eBay.

I’ve thought a little about color, but I haven’t spent any money in this category. Most of my rooms need a little more color.

“Softness” is added to rooms through things like curtains, rugs and pillows. My rooms are currently too “hard” since I don’t have any area rugs or drapes (most of our windows just have cheap white vinyl blinds - yuck!).

Of course, cooking at home was the easiest part of the week. I even did one myself! If sloppy joes count as a meal, that is…

I have no invitations to mail since I haven’t really planned a party. I think when I get finished I’ll start planning the cheesy board game night. I’ve just got way too much on my plate right now.

While some of my enthusiasm has waned, I’m halfway done, and things are looking great! This week I spent a total of $40.

On to Week 5, which focuses on the office. My main goal is to organize all the paperwork I have flying about the room, without much concern for aesthetics since we’ll be moving the office to the basement this fall (and getting real furniture instead of card tables and folding chairs - yay!).

Photo Credit: Kelley+Interior+Design,+rose+living+room by sarahleeab, used under Creative Commons Licensing.