Clearing Out The House

When you make a decision to empty your house, it's really quite difficult and time consuming to get rid of all your big furniture, and everything that you have inside closets and cabinets that make up your house-hold full of stuff (see previous post about packing). We asked our families and friends to come to help clear things out see if they wanted anything. Unfortunately, we didn't get a lot of interest as they already have everything they need.

Craigslist was helpful for selling a few items, and our children were able to use a few boxes of "stuff" and some dishes. In early August we decided to have a public open-house with an invitation to our neighbours. We marked everything in the house with a suggested price tag (bargain basement approach) and waited for the day to arrive. About 50 people came but most of them were wanting our furniture items for 50 cents and our electronics and tools for 25 cents.

In the end we did sell a few items and were able to get our list of remaining items down to something we could manage through donations to groups and organizations that really needed them.

We only have six weeks left to finalize many things - sell both vehicles, disconnect from services, donate items that are reusable by others, visit the dump with things that need to go there, clear out all of our various stashes of supplies, consumables and perishables, and get a spot organized for long term storage for the small handful of items that we will eventually ship to our new home.