Consignment Sale Time

I'm in a bit of a frenzy getting stuff together for a local semi-annual consignment sale.  Normally I take stuff to my local consignment shop.  I like it because I drop it off and they give it the yay or nay.  After that it is their problem to price and sell.  If it doesn't sell it gets donated so I never have to see it again.  I get 55% of the sale price. 

The store can be pretty picky about the brands, age, condition, etc..  I have some stuff from discount stores that my consignment shop will not accept.  Also, I still have maternity clothes from when I was pregnant with my now kindergartener.  (This is an entire post on its own.)  I don't know of a fixed-base store locally that accepts maternity clothes.  So as much as I don't like the idea of stockpiling, I have been rounding up and tagging items for the sale that happens in mid-September.  Thus far there are 97 items waiting to be sold.  I think I need to round up three more so I can say that I got rid of a nice round 100 items.  Tomorrow I will raid my daughter's toy box and closet one more time.

Stuffed Animal Overload

My 5 year old loves her stuffed animals (or snugglies), and she has tons of them.  She has so many that she can’t possibly play with them all.  I'm not sure she even knows what she has.  Years ago the snugglies overwhelmed the tub I put in her room to contain them.  Today I decided that it was time to deal with them because they were taking over her room.  Here is what we started with.  

I didn’t count how many were there but as you can see, it is too many.  My only rule for the reduction was that everything had to fit into the tub.  I did make a concession for the Build-A-Bears and her beloved Pooh bear that is huge.  Those were automatically keepers, but everything else had to fit in the tub.  In the end, I took out two kitchen size trash can bags of stuffed animals which is about a 2/3 reduction in stuffed animals.  Here are the animals who made the cut.

Now if I can keep her grandparents (specifically her Nana) from repopulating the snugglies. . . Christmas is only 4 months away so I better start laying the groundwork for a stuffed animal free Christmas today.

The Summer of Chaos

This summer was a wild ride full of birthday parties, travel, camps, swim lessons and one unexpected storm resulting in a 4-day long power outage.  We are still getting back to normal around our house.  Since we are 2/3 of the way through 2011, I need to get back on track and finish this project by year end.  By this point, I should have rid our household of about 243 items.  I had gotten rid of 278 items before March so I’m sure I’m still on track.  Nevertheless, let’s recount.   

During May I was stockpiling stuff for the yard sale.  At the June yard sale, I managed to sell about 75 items including some large items – patio table and chairs, camping chairs, baby items, etc.  During June, we took a lot of the unsold yard sale items to Goodwill – a total of 107 items.  In July many of the baby gear items that did not sell at the yard sale went to the local children’s consignment shop – a total of 10 items.  Even though the number was small, the impact was large because I got rid of some large baby items – pack and play, changing table, baby swing, etc.  In August I took another 80 items to Goodwill.  A total of 550 items have left our house in 2011.

The current project is to clean out my daughter’s room and give her a space better suited to a school-aged kid.  This means clearing out the rest of the baby stuff and outgrown clothes.  Since I’ve already consigned the big stuff, I’m left with the stuff that the consignment store will not take.  I have another option in one of those semi-annual multi-day consignment sales.  They are more generous in their merchandise and take a larger variety of stuff including maternity clothes.  This is the first time I have participated in this sale so this is a bit of an experiment.  I’m sure I’ll have a post about that after the dust has settled.  The long and short is that I’m back to stockpiling which I hate.  However, the sale takes place in September so I will be rid of this stuff soon enough.