The great purge – Selling everything we own for RV life!
Let the purging commence!
I went into full beast mode and tackled every box, bag, cabinet and drawer – ALL OF IT. I organized and sorted everything into categorized bins… I mean, if you really know me, you know how organized I am and this was no exception – I even had everything labeled. I forgot how many trips we made to the church, goodwill, salvation army, but they seemed never ending and completely satisfying all at once. Take it away, boys! Then came the part where everything else needed to be sold, which we took photos of and posted on various apps and Facebook garage sale pages – more on that later!
What a wild and crazy time in our lives. At some point during it all, we each lost our minds for a hot second and needed the other one to help pull us through. James was ready to set the house on fire in a giant blaze of glory and just walk away from the last of our belongings.
I was…. well, I had an emotional meltdown at the beginning of the selling phase over some sentimental items, but after that I was back in beast mode and selling things off like crazy!
So about the routes we went to sell our stuff… We used two apps, Offer Up and Let Go. Those provided about a dozen sales or so with the two of them combined. We started with Let Go and sold a bookcase and television, but expected more traffic than what we had – that’s when we tried Offer Up, which worked a little better (shockingly with the couch) BUT we still needed and expected more traffic than what we were getting. A few days pass and that’s when we stumbled on the pure insanity of Facebook garage sale pages. Holy $*#!!! we had absolutely NO idea what we were getting ourselves into with that, but it worked and it really was insane. I’ll elaborate. Facebook is a dreamboat for this sort of thing, but you seriously have to mentally and emotionally prepare yourself for the experience because people are CRAY!
We got busy one Friday night creating Garage Sale posts on the various pages for our community and surrounding neighborhoods in our Lake Nona area and we also started by making a crazy choice of also adding to the biggest page of them all – ALL OF ORLANDO – W.T.F.?!?! These people came out in droves, fighting over and claiming everything we posted, as soon as James would hit the damn post button. We had never seen anything quite like it. I was trying to take pictures of everything fast enough and we were going back and forth with people over pricing and location meet up negotiations and then I’m running all around looking for stuff that’s been claimed so I could tag it with all of the proper information so we don’t screw anything up and piss anyone off – which was necessary and yet we still managed to highly piss off one serious online garage sale goer… WHEW!!! We didn’t want her to have our large toaster oven anyway! hahaha
So, that Friday night we were non-stop and James was amazing trying to keep up with all of these people (I didn’t know then just how wild it was to keep up with these peeps at this point) and it was a REALLY late night for us, but we made the best of it. I mean seriously people, don’t you sleep?!
Saturday rolled around and we were stunned. We were driving all over Central Florida meeting people and delivering sold items, as well as taking all of my books, movies, music to a couple spots to sell before donating the rest. THAT was when I lost it. We were in College Park, in front of a record store and James had originally spoken to a few people interested in buying all of my board games. Well, at some point I had to do my part in the Facebook mayhem – I thought I knew what James was dealing with, but I had NO idea until I was drowning in it, trying to keep up AND most importantly, keep people in the right order. I had so many people fighting for the more personal, sentimental items at this point and then I had two people in the area wanting to buy this whole lot of board games and we were doing a first come, first serve where we were and it hit me…
Now selling my $20 Ikea bookshelf or my television wasn’t a big deal – it was the personal, sentimental items that were getting to me and these board games were a part of that since most were original/vintage and I grew up playing them throughout my childhood, mostly with my grandparents as far back as my memory allows. Shit was getting personal and these betches broke me. I lost it in James’ truck as soon as we pulled into the record store parking lot. I mean, full on ugly cry breakdown.
James was a champ, he comforted me and tried to talk to me and explain that he understood where I was coming from and then it happened… I blurted out with my ugly cry face and all my tears “nobody even knows what Othello is!! WAAAAAAHHHHHH!!!!!!!” That’s when James laughed, and for good reason because looking back, that was a hilarious moment for us in this chaotic part of our journey and then James said that we would keep my Othello game.
The calm was starting to slowly roll back in and the ugly crying and gasps for air were beginning to subside.
“But we are only keeping what we absolutely need.” I said. James… amazing as he then declared that one board game isn’t going to weigh down the RV and take up a ton of space and then suggested it was good to have a game on board we can play anyway. He immediately wrote back the interested buyers, explaining the sentiment of this one particular game and took it out of the lot. The man is outstanding! It’s the little things. By the way, the song Riverman by Noel Gallagher and the High Flying Birds was playing in the truck when this happened and that’s all we think about now whenever we hear it. At least it was a slow and soothing song, hahaha!!!
What a day!!! Yet, things get even more interesting later that evening…
