These days, with or without shoes, the moment we turn our backs you slip out the door and to your swing. You’ll talk and swing and sing gently, it’s the most precious thing we’ve ever seen.

Since we moved 4 years ago we’ve kept a terrible secret. Not that it’s actually a big secret, because if you’ve spent even a few moments in our home you already know.

It’s a crazy mad house.

There are projects, meals, pets, gardens, jobs, hobbies and the needs of four distinct personalities all stuffed into one particle accelerator. The result is a house of things-to-be-tripped over and things-to-be-unhappily-discovered-later. During the 20 minutes a day I spend bent over the 10 load laundry pile finding a sports bra I finally settled on the main reason it’s such a disaster:

We have too much stuff.

On several levels. First off: Just too much crap. No one needs 20 towels or 8 pairs of shoes. Or 4 tea sets and 3 abandoned bikes. Secondly: We have too much stuff to do. To many deadlines, obligations, self imposed ideas of grandeur…just TOO much.

So I had this brilliant idea to have a yard sale. It took almost the whole summer to prepare for. Each Saturday we would go through a section of the house, cull some belongings, and haul out to the garage. We battled through the attic spaces, the kitchen, and finally the basement. The sad part about the basement is that it was things we mostly hadn’t unpacked in the first place. Just our belongings squished into a cardboard box, molding and gathering neglect points.

Prior to this project there were sections of the house and property that I literally ran by. The same way you would run when you don’t want to be noticed by the paparazzi, with your purse over your head and ducking into a moving car. The way I saw it, is if the neglected piles of crap didn’t see me then I didn’t need to deal with them. Win-win, right?

Not really. So it was time to have a yardsale and let my trash be someone else’s steal. Yard sales are hard work. Here was my to do:

- Make 8 of the finest yard sale signs Fall City has ever seen
- Set up large tables on saw horses borrowed from neighbors
- buy those little sticker thingers
- set everything out
- price everything
- place ad on craigslist & fall city yahoo group
- get up super early with your comfy clothes on and get ready to BARTER like it’s 1499

There are a million little infant psycho-dramas that occur during the releasing of stuff back into the wild. At first, you think you don’t really have very much, since the things you have are “nice”. Then you start chucking a few items out and it starts to feel good. Suddenly, everything in the house is just “stuff” and you could let it all go. “Be gone! You – Out! You too – OUT!” and the yard sale pile is growing and growing.

But then, when you approach the pile of useless, broken, annoying stuff it suddenly leaps back at you with an evil sneer “But I was the dress you wore to your first band camp!” and “I’m your grandfather’s favorite rotary nose hair clippers – you can’t let me go!”. The pricing exercise begins to get difficulty, even draining. I had to stop, take a break, and have snack inside my torn apart house just to recoup.

Once I had priced everything to the best of my totally biased and greedy ability, it was time to watch strangers walk around judging your life. Apparently my taste in orange dishes and half-broken IKEA furniture isn’t that appealing. My Dad’s terribly fancy (although outdated old tech) electronics were quite the hit of the sale.

While we are on the topic, the characters who show up to these sales are their own special breed. (Christa – don’t take this the wrong way). Right away, the early birds show up driving circles around the lot trying to get a peek and decide if they will commit a whole 10 minutes to your sale. When they do come it, they don’t say “Hi” since they are too busy finding the treasure that is going to elevate them to celebrity status on “Antiques Roadshow”.

After those ultrafocused early shoppers come the browsers. We had several people who milled around the yard sale for literally 1 or 2 hours. Just chillin’. Checking out each shoe, flipping through a book, making a phone call, then doing some more browsing in the housewares division. I prefer the browsers to the third archetype – the sketchy dude who keeps coming back for more. Driving and circling, mysteriously tugging on his goatee and blinking too much. No, I don’t have any more copper or scrap metal, thanks for asking.

Back to watching people take your stuff. Besides the emotional resiliency required to set the pricing, watching someone choose an item and walk off with it made me feel either awesome or terrible. Awesome when something that I would have dropped off at the dump is now $5 in my jar and terrible when I sell something that was loaded with meaning. Like when I sold the fancy shawl Britton got for me to wear at an event after Luna died and literally nothing could fit me. It was a coverall of sorts, and while it was lovely and meaningful, it also reminded me of a terrible time. So seeing a woman pad off with her new fancy shawl was a little bitter/sweet. Forget the part where she paid 1/30th of what we purchased it for.

A couple of lessons learned:
- I am not bringing anything into this house with out removing 2 items first
- The amount of kids clothes we have is borderline irresponsible (even though I love them all)
- Having less stuff feels really good
- It’s really, really, hard and complicated to get rid of stuff. So don’t get any in the first place.
- If I did it again I would just list the valuable stuff on Craigslist and freecycle the rest.

Maybe I could even do it again next year. Maybe.