Everything Must Go! (Almost)

When you live in the same house for more than 5 years, you tend to accumulate a lot of stuff. Moving is the best reason for weeding through the junk and getting rid of the things you just don't use anymore.  Unfortunately, moving just isn't in the cards for us right now. Therefore, we have been vigilantly working on building lofts in the kids' rooms, because the bedrooms are extremely small in our house, and using all possible floor space is a must.  Lofts will help us maximize the use of those areas.

As you can imagine, we still have to rid ourselves of a lot of things that are unnecessary so the rooms aren't completely cluttered once they are finished.  Our living room is a a veritable stockpile of the unnecessary.  I am constantly stepping over the growing piles, and I am in a perpetual state of discouragement. One setback I have encountered is that once I have sorted through a pile of items and designated them to save, pitch, and sell piles, I can almost always be assured that my youngest will have at some point, remixed my previously organized piles. I barely want to do this sorting the first time, let alone multiple times.

Usually, we would cart everything to Goodwill and be done with it, but we have so many things that we are getting rid of, we have decided to have a garage sale. Some things, after seeing them in my living room, untouched for days on end, and being stepped over because they are constantly in the way, are being relegated to the sell pile on the sole basis of my annoyance. My husband has even begun to enthusiastically add things to our growing list, and one thing he would dearly love to add, I have had to put the kibosh on.

Here is the story. About 13 or so years ago, we were both employed and a cocky upstart of a couple. We had to have nice furniture to go with our newly built house, because we had nothing better to do with our money apparently (boy have times changed!). At the time, I picked out a set of bedroom furniture for our grand master bedroom. We agreed on it, we priced it out, and went to buy it at our favorite furniture store. While there to make the purchase, my husband got distracted by a bigger and much pricier set of furniture.  I waffled a bit, but he was so adamant on the furniture I finally caved.  Fast forward to our more modest one income and kids lifestyle, and the furniture for the master bedroom is too much. A 4 poster bed in a master bedroom with vaulted ceilings is impressive, which is what we originally had. A 4 poster bed in an 8 foot ceiling room equipped with a ceiling fan, much less impressive.  In fact, for years we have barely had room to navigate around our room because of the oversized furniture, and it looks overcrowded and cluttered even when it looks its best. I would sell the whole set tomorrow if we had a good alternative for furniture, but we don't.  So, my husband wants to at least get rid of the bed frame.  The problem is, the furniture is made from a soft wood, easily marred, kind of a blond cherry color, where marks show well. At age three, our eldest, used both of the bedposts at the end of the bed as a way to combat boredom, or maybe as an alternative to taking out aggression on her sibling. So, all up and down both of those posts are teeth marks. Quite innocently, my husband suggested we sell it in our upcoming garage sale.  I looked at him like he had lost his mind, "What will our neighbors think if we try to sell a bed frame with teeth marks all over it!"It didn't take him long to concede that might look a little "odd" to those that don't know the story. I think it is safe to say that one thing you will NOT see at our garage sale is any of our bedroom furniture, but at this point, anything else may be up for grabs.