Friday, June 15, 2012

Chaos, Craziness and Dust

Last post was all about selling 'stuff.' The blog I created to help with the selling process worked fairly well. Lots of calls and texts, and emails. Lots. Asking me to "send me another picture", "what are the measurements-again", "is it really gold gold, or more of a yellow gold, or does it have green in it?"  Seriously? To some of the responses (mainly text, after the 3rd one usually) I would type "just come by and see it please."

It was exhausting. My living room was filled with tables of stuff, and invariably when someone would come over to look, they would ask "what else do you have?" - and I would tell them that I could only get so much ready at a time because I had to clean the item, take pictures, post it etc.....and some people would ask to go through my house!! What?

So I posted earlier this week about contracting with an estate sale company. I'm still very happy about the decision to contract with them.

They will arrive July 9th and work for 10 days straight to get everything staged and ready for the sale. My estate sale will be held July 19 (my 49th birthday OMG) thru July 21. So that means any and every item I do not want sold must be put away, hidden. Since we are not selling my master bedroom furniture, we decided to keep that room off limits. Unfortunately, the sitting room part of the master bedroom WAS my staging area for items I was getting ready to sell, so it is full of stuff that I need to move OUT of the bedroom. Augh. This is embarrassing, but I am posting a picture of what it looks like this morning, even though yesterday I removed many many boxes of stuff:



As soon as they leave on Monday I start emptying out the sitting room. Oh crap, I have to clean out the drawers of the antique dresser that's in there, and sort through ALL the craft items I put in there, and..... the Lane chest filled with blankets and quilts. Chaos.

Tuesday thru Thursday I spend removing photos from frames. Dusting off the frames. Getting sick from all the dust. Cough cough. Going through old photos and removing the ones I want to keep and giving the rest to the children's father. Most of the photos are copies, and the rest are in 30+ photo albums, many which are 'scrapbook style'. Yikes! More craziness. I decide to bargain with my ex - he scans the photos for me, he gets to keep the albums. He accepts the offer. Albums are stacked up and ready for him to take. So is the gigantic box of photos, negatives and other stuff. More dust, some of these albums haven't been looked at since I moved in the house 8 years ago. Cough.

Dozens of board games are stacked in one corner of the man cave/bonus room. I stirred up the dust on that project, as many of the games have been sitting for a long time, some of them are little kid games and my kids are 18 and 24 now. That's lots of sitting and collecting dust!

What the heck are we going to do with all those CDs? Covered in dust too.... cough.

Kid's rooms - my older son's stuff that he still has at my house. Guess what? His father can take that! He doesn't know it yet, but it will be waiting for him when he gets the albums.  Since Alec is going off to college in a few months, he won't have room to store things, so maybe I can get his stuff over to his dad's as well.

All this has to be done before June 23rd - this is where the craziness part comes in: Ken's daughter and her two boys, ages 4 and 11 months, are coming to visit for 5 days. YIKES! My house is not, and has never been childproof. Now it is a complete hazard, a serious danger zone. I pray the children don't get hurt. They may need hard hats. I will need more than wine to calm my nerves, at least I have plenty of vodka.

For those of you who have decades of 'stuff' just collecting dust, get rid of it NOW. Do it years before you move. If you think it will only take a month, triple that.

Today I am heading out to get medium weight drop cloths to put over the white living room sofa which we are not selling right away. Then I can stack stuff on top, move the rest of the items out of the sitting room, and the suitcases that are blocking half the master bath can take their rightful place on the floor, to be filled with Ecuador bound items. The Space Bags are at the ready, waiting to be filled.

It's really happening. Cough cough. Soon, the dust will settle, the craziness will turn to calm, and all the chaos will have been worth it.

Hasta luego, chao chao, and all the good stuff,

Tami





1 comment:

  1. Oh, girlfriend - I feel for you!
    Hang in there, the hardest part is almost over!

    ReplyDelete