Yard Sale: The Price is Not Right

Each year on my daughter’s birthday, which is today, I post one of my earlier columns from when she was young.  This one ran in First Magazine. Happy Birthday, Coleen Noel.

Recently, I got into one of my frenzied cleaning moods.  Usually, when this happens, I find relief in a bottle of Windex and some Brillo pads.  But this time, I needed to do more than clean — I needed to clean out.  So, I announced to my husband and daughter that we were going to have a yard sale.

At the mere mention of this event, the two of them dashed off  to parts of the house they had not yet discovered: the basement, the attic and the bottom of their closets.  Their mission: to gather, hide and protect their valuables from my wrath.

“You want to sell our belongings?” they asked in disbelief.

“No,” I answered curtly.  “I want to sell our junk.”

“But I don’t want to sell my stuff.  I still use it,” my husband moaned.

“Yeah, I see how handy this 1973 New York Yankee yearbook has been through the years, “ I said sarcastically. “ It works so well as a cobweb catcher in the back of the basement.”

“I still look at it,” he insisted.

I knew this was not an arguable point.  He was living in denial and the only way to snap him out of it was to prove to him that his yearbook was worthless. I gave him the number of a baseball memorabilia collector and told him to call.  Within two minutes he came back wearing a “dreams smashed to smithereens” look on his face.

“What happened?”  I asked with sincere compassion.

“It’s not worth anything.” he muttered.

Being the sap I am, I caved.

“Okay, you can keep the yearbook if you try really hard to clear out your shop and the attic. Is that a deal?”

He happily agreed and bopped away in victory.

Next, I turned my attention to my daughter, Coleen,  who had barricaded herself in the Barbie room. Yes, we have a Barbie Room. It’s pink, bright and scares the living hell out of our German Shepherd, Miss Muffie.

“I’m not selling any of my Barbies!  You can’t have them!” she screamed through the locked door.

“I don’t want any of your 62,000 dolls,” I reassured her.  “I want the stuff you don’t play with anymore.  The baby stuff. ”

“But what if I want to play with them again someday? Then I won’t have them.”

All I could think at this point was “Here we go again. Like father like daughter.  This kid may look like me, but her brain works just like her father’s.”

To handle my charming and obstinate child, I took a different approach.

“C.C., let’s talk money.  Any money made from the sale of your toys goes directly to you.  You can do whatever you want with it.  It doesn’t have to go in the bank.”

After I  put that promise in writing,  she dashed off  to clear out her room, the Barbie room, the family room and any other room that held her belongings.  I finally had them in the yard sale spirit.

I’ll admit right now I got a bit carried away with this sale.  I now understand why my family expressed such concern when I mentioned my desire to host one of these events.  My husband says I possessed a greedy glint in my eye whenever I passed an object in the house that had the potential of wearing a price tag.

For weeks before the sale, my family heard the same questions over and over.

“Do we need that dresser? Do we need that coffee table?  Do we need that bed?  Do we need that car?”

Okay, so I got scary.

My husband, who is probably the most patient man on Earth, argued repeatedly with me.

“If you sell that, we have to replace it which means —what?” he would ask leadingly.

“It means we buy new stuff,” I answered matter of factly.

“But it will cost us more to replace the old stuff!”

As if logic was going to bring me down.

“So?”

“So?  We’ll be in hock for years.”

Leave it to him to find the negatives in all this. Anyway, we had the yard sale, and I tried my best to sell stuff I no longer wanted in the house.  I put tags on the coffee table, my husband’s worn out recliner and even his T-bird.  People came, looked and bought.  But alas, no one bought these items.  At the end of the day, we dragged them back into the house, and we pulled the car back on to the driveway.  My husband sat in his recliner and emitted the loudest sigh of relief I have ever heard.  He was a happy man.  He had his chair, his coffee table and his car. They were still safe.

“You know,” he said to me triumphantly.  “This was a great sale.  We should do it again next year.”