Practice what you preach

     Usually the first thing I tell my sellers is that they need to de-clutter their house if they want to sell. I always feel a little guilty about doing this since I have a bit of a clutter problem myself. Let’s just say that I haven’t been able to park my car in the garage in years and more recently I have lost track of the floor (that’s not hard to do when it’s filled with #@*#). After my latest listing appointment and watching an episode of Hoarders I decided that enough was enough and I needed to start practicing what I preach.

So for the past week I have been cleaning out my Garage. At times it became a little overwhelming, but when I started to lose my cool I just took a break and returned when I was mentally and physically ready. During this process I found things that I didn’t know I had, didn’t want to admit I ever owned and things I had borrowed (and obviously hadn’t returned). It actually is a great feeling to purge stuff. I honestly feel a lot better now that most of the stuff is gone (I feel a lot calmer and productive).

It is easy to figure out the stuff that is trash. It’s more difficult to figure out what to do with the stuff that is perfectly good but you don’t need. In previous posts I have given a whole list of resources on where to donate or swap your goods. This was a little different; I had stuff that was expensive and I wanted to make a few bucks to help pay for some storage solutions (I obviously need) for my garage. I could have had a tag sale but that would have taken a lot of time (and I probably would have only made a few bucks). I needed something else.

I was talking to some fellow realtors about my dilemma and a new agent in the office suggested that I sell my stuff on e-bay. Christina gave me a few pointers and I decided to give it a try; it seemed easy enough I thought. After a little investigation I found some other possible places to sell my stuff on line for a profit. I narrowed it down to four sites (e-bay, Amazon, Abunda trade and Volusion). All of these sites have helpful how to guides to help the most novice of sellers (they also have fees attached so make sure you read the rules carefully before you join). In the end I realized that I just didn’t have the time to prepare the items for sale so I paid a fee and had someone else do it for me. I was able to reach my goal of de- cluttering the garage while making some money. Now all I have to do is get some shelving and storage solutions for the stuff that is left. All in all it was a positive experience. When things slow down a bit I am going to take a stab at actually selling some items on line (all by myself-I will do another blog post and let ya know how it turns out).