Cleaning out the house before MOVING - Some tips. (movers, ship, move)

[Mike from back east]

I'm not a Realtor nor am I associated in any way with the industry. This is a tip from personal experience.

Moving in Spring 2005 was a very busy time, especially after 30+ years of accumulating stuff. Every closet was full, and the garage.

A lot of stuff needs to go and go early. I'm not talking about the week before the movers come to move you out. You need to clear stuff out even before you can reasonably expect to have a successful Open House to sell your home. One of the first things any Realtor will tell you is to clear out the house - the more empty it is the more spacious it will appear to potential buyers, and the quicker it will sell.

Start early - don't wait for your Realtor to prod you. We had stuff we never used but still had value. We started by giving stuff to family members. Then we did the yard sale. I hate yard sales, no one wants to pay anything and you hustle all day for a 100 bucks. Yuck.

Even if you're years from selling and moving, get the house looking lean and keep it lean. I should've gotten rid of my old 33 RPM records years ago, but didn’t. These don't sell well on ebay, so we lugged them along on the move. I will get rid of them before my next move, as well as the old cassettes and VHS tapes. There are some neat turntables coming out that plug into your computer so you can copy LP's to your hard drive and make your own CD's, but it takes time, and I have a couple hundred of them.

If you can’t use ebay to sell the stuff that's laying around, and it still has value, but you hate to toss it, GIVE it away. Good riddance to all that stuff. We took a ton of stuff to Goodwill, stuff we couldn’t move at a yard sale (box fan, bench grinder, floor standing humidifier, etc) but we found another way - “freecycling.” We now do it all the time via a website called Freecycle.

http://www.FreeCycle.org is a group that uses free Yahoo lists (set up by locality) for people to give stuff away rather than send it to a landfill. The idea behind freecycle is to keep stuff out of landfills.

The service is free but you have to subscribe to a local group in order to see OFFERs, or to post OFFERs or to claim items someone is giving away. It may help you. We’ve used it with good success. You’re supposed to join only the one in your immediate area.

As a member of a freecycle list, you may claim as many items as you want that other people offer up, all you have to do it claim it by email and then go pick it up. When you offer stuff to others, they come pick it up at your house.

If you have a great deal of stuff to give away, and don't want to deal with individual freecyclers coming by the house for one item at a time, you can do a "freecycle yard meetup" where you send an email to your local group and let them come by on Saturday morning and claim things. It looks just like a yard sale, but really isn't one. If a non-freecycler wants to take something, charge them a buck or whatever, but if a freecycler shows up with a copy of your email, they get it for free. (Yes, you can run it as both a yard sale that is open to the public AND as a freecycle yard meetup, as I've described.)

The national site is http://www.freecycle.org and then pick the region from the left side menu, then pick you city, and in some cases, your neighborhood may have it's own group.

Just about anything is fair game for offering up on freecycle. Empty moving boxes are VERY desirable items and people are always looking for them, so no need to put them out for the trash collectors, offer them on freecycle.

Give it a try! If you like it, pass this on to others. Good luck!

s/Mike

[silverClimber2go]

Mike- as an avid Freecycler I wholeheartedly agree with you on giving away those useful items to someone who can really use them. I have given away about 10 items in less than a month, and it makes me feel really, really good to see how happy it makes people. I have also met some wonderful people I otherwise would have never known. I personally have a deadline date to sell my house (per the divorce papers) and have been whittling away at 13 years of accumulated crap for over two years now. It hardly looks like I've touched anything! So, my way of getting rid of the excess is by having an estate sale. I am going to take what I have, divide it up according to the estate sale rules and let them run with it. It has a much higher return rate than a rummage sale, and I won't have to deal with it other than boxing it up. Several friends have done this and it's worked wonders! You tend to want to put more in the box too, because you know you're getting more for you dollar than the rummage sale would get you.

[pixieshmoo]

It's funny I should come across this thread. In my "circle" of family and friends, I am considered the "throw away queen". I don't keep anything!!! Seriously though, my mother used to yell at me as a teen because my theory was "if I haven't used it within the past 6 months or if it's in the back of my closet, I don't NEED it" and I'd chuck it. Now, in my "thirty-something's" I have friends who ask me to come help clean their house because they need my "inspiration" to be able to part with things. I have never heard of freecycle, but I will look into it. I use ebay, I donate stuff to all kinds of places (red cross, goodwill, veterans, etc.) I give things to family and friends that need stuff. As a piece of advice, I read somewhere quite sometime ago (I think it's some sort of buddhist or zen saying, maybe chinese, I don't know) anyway, it's a saying that has always stuck with me: "Clean out your home and you clean out your soul" It's true. Did you ever do a good cleaning out/giving away? You feel so much better and lighter afterward, no more extra baggage, plus, you may have helped someone. Most material items are not actually sentimental. Sentimentallity is in your heart and mind, we hold onto things believing they are what reminds us of our past or loved ones...not true. It's ourselves that hold those memories. However, in one materialistic defense, photos will never lose their sentiment. If my house burned down tomorrow (God forbid), I'd grab my family, the kids' favorite teddys, my case of photos and I'd move on (broke and half naked, of course, but in reality everything else is replacable). Getting rid of stuff is definitely part of clearing your mind and spirit...and house!!!

Ps. Don't get me wrong, my kids and even myself have "memory boxes" with photos or favorite items, but they are organized and in one spot, behind closed doors (and they'd come with us). These are boxes I have created as to keep my childrens' spirits about their belongings, without the clutter that I had to experience when cleaning out my parents home after they passed. You don't realize what you (or your parents) accumulate over the course of years. Now that we've gotten rid of stuff we don't need and have kept stuff we want, I'm hoping my kids will not become clutterbugs.

On the other hand, SilverClimber, sometimes it does take a long time to bring yourself to a strong enough point to do something like that...it took me a few years too. But you'll know when you're ready and you will know what's right to keep and not to keep. Good luck with your sale when you have it.

[chiroptera]

Great post, Mike!
I've used freecycle too, it's a great system. When I bought my old house, it came with piles of junque in the basement. Amazing what people will come and take away, if it's free! Saved me money on Dumpster rental, too.

[Ms.Phitt]

Mike, as usual your posts are wonderfully helpful!! Thank you ever so much!

[fastfilm]

Thank you from two inveterate pack rats. Here's to our future organizing.

[brian_2]

Thank you Mike, nice post. I'm a lifelong mover, and it's still a challenge to downsize my accumulated stuff. I grew up with older adults around me who had that depression-era attitude that you never throw anything away. Never heard of "freecycle.org." but will check it out. I met a woman in NY who had a successful business helping widow/widowers (of which I'm one) remove a lifetime of buildup stuff.

[LongShot]

I just signed up for the Yahoo group Freecycle in my area. Waiting for Approval now. Sounds like a great program!

[Mike from back east]

Originally Posted by brian_2

Thank you Mike, nice post. I'm a lifelong mover, and it's still a challenge to downsize my accumulated stuff. I grew up with older adults around me who had that depression-era attitude that you never throw anything away. Never heard of "freecycle.org." but will check it out. I met a woman in NY who had a successful business helping widow/widowers (of which I'm one) remove a lifetime of buildup stuff.

Good for you! Freecycle is good for a lot of stuff most folks just throw away. You'd be amazed what people take when it's free. Busted stuff will find a new home if someone needs a part off that item to fix one they have that's just like it. I needed an old kitchen range hood with a fan, to use as the top of a paint booth for our hobbies of airbrushing model horses and trains. Found a brand new one the same day I asked for one on my local Freecycle group. All I had to do was drive over and pick it up. Free. I gave away all my moving boxes - a popular item, as are kitchen items. Clothing is a good one too. Clothes don't sell well at yard sales, even at 50-cents per, and places like Goodwill end up selling a lot of clothing to scrap dealers who cut it up or ship it to Africa. Goodwill turn-in centers have such mountains of stuff they can't handle it all, so I give stuff away on freecycle and let it go. No sense working all week to mark items for a yard sale, then work all day Saturday and walk away with $50 to show for all the effort - bah humbug on yard sales.

People with lifetime accumulations of nice items that still have value should try the "estate sale" option as mentioned by silverClimber2go in posting #2 of this thread. I've heard many people swear this works great. Firms that run estate sales will know which items have real value and make sure you get the best price for your goods.

A lot of families have stuff they think is just Granpa's junk, but some of that stuff is valuable. I'm in the railroad history and model railroad hobby, and all of that stuff has value. Even old railroad paper items have value, often tons of value, depending on age. We in the railroad hobbies have two key concerns when one of our old pals passes away: (1) That opportunistic bottom-fishers will victimize unknowing family members getting them to take mere pennies-on-the-dollar for old trains or old Railroad paper and hardware, or; (2) That unknowing family members will consider those old Railroad items to be just gramp's worthless silly old railroad stuff and throw it in a dumpster. Ouch. People need to know that most of that stuff has value. Old model trains, especially with the boxes, are highly prized by collectors. Old Railroad paper is valued by collectors as well as railroad and local historical societies.

Give freecycle.org a try and let us know how you do.

s/Mike

[Mike from back east]

Originally Posted by LongShot

I just signed up for the Yahoo group Freecycle in my area. Waiting for Approval now. Sounds like a great program!

Longshot: Did you get into your Freecycle group? How'd it go?

s/Mike