In Spring 2021, the housing market was on absolute fire 🔥 as people realized that working from home in the middle of a Pandemic was so much more enjoyable in a big house. I made the decision to move back in with my parents and rent out my house. This meant I had to downsize, a LOT, and all my stuff ended up in a storage unit. My original plan was to buy another house after about one year. Fast forward and more than two years have passed since then. And still, I’m paying $200 every month for a storage unit! That’s $2,400 a year😱!
Talk about a waste of money! So finally, I moved everything out of the storage unit into my parents’ house to cancel the storage unit, and now my least favorite activity is here: selling. I hate this nearly as much as clothes shopping.
Let’s talk!
Step 1: Catalog Everything
First step was to catalog everything. I managed to live without all the stuff for a couple years and I didn’t even remember what all I had. I first had to catalog everything. Of course, I did this is an Apple Numbers Spreadsheet. I gathered the items, makes, models, specs. Talk about exhausting, but this is ✅ Done!
Step 2: Disposition
Second step was to disposition everything. To make a final and decisive determination for each item in my spreadsheet. I simplified this into three potential dispositions:
- Keep
- Sell
- Donate
This is where the tough decisions came in. Should I keep that 10-year-old brown sofa that’s in great condition? Should I sell it and buy a new one later? Will brown even fit in with the home decor of my future house? 🤷♂️
Bottom line, I marked each and every item in the spreadsheet with one a disposition. This helped me filter down what exactly goes where and when for the rest of a garage sale.
Items that I did decide to keep were straight forward and I put them in a spare bedroom in the house. Easy peasy and done.
Step 3: Research Items to Sell
For items that I decided to sell, I wanted to recuperate as much value as I could. This meant research work into what the market was willing to pay. I had to go back to my records to find out how much I paid for items in the first place, what the market was willing to pay, and how much I was willing to haggle down to for each item. The intent here is to list everything on Craigslist or eBay or Facebook perhaps.
This brings us to the current time where I’m at. The next step is to list all the items for sale.
Step 4: List Items for Sale
I hate garage sales. I don’t go to garage sales, and I do not want to host a sale. Yes, I’m maximum introvert and what’s an introvert to do? Sell the items online of course! This has the benefit of allowing me to filter solicitations, and avoid having to host an in-person sale event 😰
And that’s where I’m at! I’ll have to circle back around to update on how my virtual garage sale and house downsizing has played out.
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