Garage Sale Day

Today is the neighborhood garage sale. About a month ago, when the neighbors decided on the date, I thought it would be perfect timing — I hoped we'd be close to done packing up the house, we'd have the basement and the garage completely cleared out, and we'd have a ton of stuff to sell. In my head, I'd already spent the money on paint for the new house. Um, nope.

Since the mortgage process has been consuming me, I've really just managed to mess up the entire current house by pulling everything out of its home, and all without putting a single item in a box. While I'm pretty proud of the inventory I managed to throw together in just a couple hours on Thursday night, there's still so much more I want purge.

I've always had a lot of stuff: books, vintage Pyrex, clothes, shoes, purses, dishes, knick-knacks, three sets of flatware. Hell, we even have four sets of coasters for one coffee table. You'd think that having lived in 11 places over the last 13 years would have forced me to downsize. But with every move, I felt like I got rid of at least 25% of my belongings. Unfortunately, my stuff problem is a lot like my weight problem — I work really hard to get rid of it, then before I know it, I have just as much as I started with, and sometimes more. It's probably a management issue. I don't have good habits, so I eat too much at dinner without exercising enough the next morning, and I bring too much into the house without getting rid of old things to make room. Then, I crash diet and crash purge. Oh, and then there's the crash opening six months worth of mail thing (though I recently found a year-old check for $100, more on that later!).

To make matters worse, hoarding is in my blood. On both sides. I hold onto things because they have sentimental value, or for perfectly practical reasons (you never know when that expensive sunscreen that totally irritates my skin will come in handy, right?). A lot of stuff stays because I don't want to hurt the feelings of the person who gave it to me. And when you're a person with a lot of stuff, people want to give you more stuff.

I'm slowly losing that sense of sentimentality, though, and I think it's a good thing.

Now that we're (hopefully) moving into a house that will be ours — ours for as long as we want it to be ours — I just don't want to be surrounded by so much stuff. While I think my home will always be a little messy, it doesn't have to be so cluttered.

Over the next few weeks, I'm going to try to get rid of at least two times more stuff than I put out for today's garage sale. I'm sure I'll always hold onto the box of my Grandma Ruth's costume jewelry, and my Grandma Freda's wacky shoes. But before I put anything else in a box or bag meant for the new house, I'll ask myself "Do you use this?" If the answer is "no," the next question will be, "Do you love it?" If the answer to that is "no," I should just get rid of it. However, taking this project into consideration, I should probably also ask myself, "Do you think you'll need this, or something like it, within the next year?" If I can't answer "yes" to at least one of those questions, it should go.

Honestly, for as much as I hold onto things, I've never missed anything I've sold or given away (save for a few cute vintage dresses I now see on my cute friends). If I can get another garage sale together, I might as well make back at least some of the money I wasted on all of that stuff I didn't even need in the first place. If not, Goodwill is good enough for me.

As far as this garage sale goes, everyone in the neighborhood thought everyone else was going to put signs up on the main streets, so we're not getting much traffic. Since I promised Kyle none of this stuff would go back in the house or garage, I might be making a trip to Goodwill sooner than later.

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Everyday Silver

In the last year, I've inherited (if you want to call it that) two collections of silver. The first was a beautiful, velvet-lined box of mostly Rogers Bros. Adoration pattern — dainty silver-plated flatware that belonged to my great aunt Norma — mixed in with some other random pieces that must have belonged to my grandmother, and Norma's sister, Freda. Grandma Freda's mismatched additions are easily identified; like most everything else valuable and metal she owned (keys, platters, used batteries that still had some juice), hers are marked on the back with a dot of bright pink nail polish.

The second silver collection — each set individually wrapped and tied — came from Kyle's grandmother (who is still living in Iowa but recently moved into a smaller place), along with a full set of Haviland china.

For our last few dinner parties, I've busted out the china from Kyle's family and the silver from mine. Because I'm classy like that.

The silver required a good polishing, which was easily accomplished with Bar Keeper's Friend (though as I later found out, that is a major a no-no). Since then, after using it, I've hand washed each piece, dried them with a soft cloth, and put everything back in its box, which I then shoved into an overstuffed makeshift sideboard in our cramped dining room. Well, all of the pieces except for this one spoon, which somehow never made it back into the box and has been through at least five cycles in the dishwasher.

To my surprise, it's totally fine. I was always told I wasn't supposed to put silver in the dishwasher, but I was also always told I wasn't supposed to wear lipstick and eyeliner at the same time, or wear a black bra with a white shirt, and I've been doing both comfortably for years. I'm pretty sure the scratches were there before I was born, and even if they're the result of my abrasive "polishing," I'm okay with that.

So, I think this collection is about to become my everyday silver.



As I prepare for our neighborhood garage sale (and hopefully for a move, should my terrible credit not prevent us from buying a house this summer), I'm trying to get rid of anything we don't need or really, really love.

We simply have too much stuff to live simply — especially in the kitchen.

To try and adapt to our stuff, or at least tame it, I've turned our breakfast nook into an appliance pantry, and trained Kyle on my storage system: "The turkey baster goes in the Not-Commonly-Used-Utensil Drawer, as opposed to the Commonly-Used-Utensil Drawer. Duh."

While I understand (and have supported with many gifts) Kyle's need for a meat grinder, meat slicer and mandoline, and he puts up with my collections of vintage Pyrex, tiny juice glasses and blue Ball jars, there are many more things that can go. The hodgepodge of cheap flatware I've been accumulating since I moved to New York when I was 18 should be among the first. A household of two does not need three different collections of utensils. 

Enter everyday silver. 

Worst-case scenario, a few pieces end up in a nasty fight with the garbage disposal, or after five more trips through the dishwasher, I learn why I'm supposed to wash it by hand. Maybe I'll need to get a few replacement pieces from eBay or Etsy, and mark them with bright red nail polish. Either way, we'll still have a set of "nice silver," right?

Maybe this is why I shouldn't have nice things. But I'd like to think that the practical part of Grandma Freda (no matter how small that part was; the woman did tell me on more than one occasion to always sacrifice comfort for beauty), or at least my Great Aunt Norma (who was a lawyer before it was cool for women to be lawyers) would have appreciated my utilitarian approach to their utensils.  

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