Countdown . . .

Ok – it has been awhile.  I spent a crushing two weeks after leaving my job setting up a combined estate sale for our items as well as my parents who are downsizing after 50 plus years.  My last day of work was  June 13, on June 14 we started moving boxes and boxes of stuff (with help from family and two hired hunks from Evergreen Moving in Spanaway) to our home which we have been renting from my sister. That same day my sister moved her bedroom furniture in and she and her husband were back in their home after an almost 2 year absence.  So now we had my sister and her husband, me and my three international students living in the house which was full of boxes and furniture which needed to be staged and marked for an estate sale. We were soon joined by the parents of one of the students who were visiting for graduation. A full house and difficult transition for someone who doesn’t handle clutter very well.

I have had an estate sale before but we hired Sisters – a local antique shop and estate sale business to handle the sale.  For some reason I didn’t even think of doing that this time.  A huge mistake!  Even though we had plenty of help from my brother in law, sister, and especially my daughter Christina it was days and days of work to research and mark the tools, china, furniture, books, kitchen items and everything that you acquire over the years.

On Tuesday June 24 I started with a friends and family sale – the reason for this was to push myself to make sure I was ready and to learn how I was going to handle the days where we were open to the public.  I learned a good lesson at the sale.  My husband bought a few Starbucks mugs from other cities when he was traveling.  To be honest, I never really liked the mugs, we didn’t have room for them in the cupboard and what we didn’t need was more mugs. I was so happy to get rid of them and listed them for .50 each. My dear friend said, “Really Dawn?  You are only charging .50 cents each?”  Yes – take them off my hands.  She calmly bought them and informed me a few days later she sold one of them for $45.  During the sale I had my cell phone and laptop and looked up any items I wasn’t sure about. Even with that  - people in the know got some great deals on our behalf. 

For our last sale with Sisters taking a 50% profit we cleared $3000, took the weekend off and came home to everything taken care of.  Doing it ourselves we put in well over 100 hours of combined labor and research, made $2000 and spent a couple of days cleaning.  Even with that our expenses were almost 40% after I bought food for our helpers and decided to pay my daughter for her help.  We also needed to hire helpers to move what was left out of the house and into the carport to be picked up later for a Habitat for Humanity sale and dump fees for everything else. I really wished I would of remembered to contact Sisters once again. 

After finishing the cleaning on Sunday evening I treated myself to steak dinner which I brought home from the Keg – unfortunately I forgot I no longer had silverware and couldn't cut my steak, thankfully the wine was great.  The next morning I headed out to Victor, ID to spend a wonderful 6 days with my son and his beautiful family.