As a result of moving from a suburban house to an apartment, Amber and I are simplifying our junk.
Thanks to Craigslist, Freecycle and eBay we’ve managed to get rid of a few items that we’ve had around that haven’t been doing their part in our house. We sold an IKEA dresser/chest that I bought when I was living solo in my apartment for $60. It served to hold some office supplies, some toys of mine and the dog’s linen (yes, our dogs have linen). A few boxes later, we’re clear one dresser/chest.
When we moved into the house, we each owned a mattress and box spring. Recently, we bought a mattress and box spring together, which brings the total count up to 3. Two existed in our basement in plastic bags until Amber found someone to take one away for us for free. It certainly beats a trip to the dump.
About two years ago I agreed to take a pool table from a friend. Great idea, except our basement was too cluttered to set it up and it say in the center of the room leaning against our supports for the duration of it’s stay with us. Here comes Craigslist one more time and it was taken away and now our basement has never seemed bigger.
And those Maxim magazines I was selling on eBay? Well I sold enough to cover the cost of all the auctions and enough to buy me a game for my PSP (and my long commute).
We’ve got a whole lot more that we’re giving away and selling. We have a pile of stuff going to a local men’s shelter, we’ve got dog stuff headed to the shelter that we adopted Leeloo from, and a truck load of stuff that’s going to an organization that puts on garage sales to benefit dogs in Puerto Rico.
And the most difficult decision for me has been that I have to sell off about half of my comic collection. There’s a fair amount of books that aren’t gaining value and have no sentimental value to me. The only contribution to my collection that they make is inflating the number of comics I own. I figure that I can get rid of about 600 and still feel good about the collection as a whole. Then I won’t worry about all those D-level books I have sitting boarded and bagged.
To help de-clutter, I’ve dropped my subscriptions to Spider-Man, Wolverine, Daredevil and the Punisher. Instead, I’ve replaced them with a subscription to Marvel’s Digital Comics Unlimited, which is better for reading comics, but worse for collectability.
Anyway, I’ll be updating about the things that we’re doing to help us in the move.