When my feet grew and Cinderella here could no longer jam her cute little feet into her 6.5 sized shoes, I had to make room in my closet for my larger sized shoes and boots. And hey, I am a girl so I don’t have just one pair of shoes that are athletic and one for business wear.
I Freecycled those old 6.5ers with amazing ease. Later I dug into my closet and cleaned out most of my outerwear. I say most because there is a storage room on my back porch that is jammed packed with two households worth of things, and somewhere behind those piles is more outerwear.
Eventually I went into my clothes closet and Freecycled my high end corporate clothes and many clothing items that were gifts (you know, the kind you can’t return without a receipt and the store is in another state, etc.). I had probably a decade or so worth of clothing gift items that really needed a new home, and so that is where they went.
Probably the most obviously huge “lightening up” Freecycle event was getting rid of a vintage stereo system. I am talking vintage with a capital V. It has two huge Infinity speakers that took up a lot of room, were heavy, clunky and not fun at all to carry downstairs for the pickup. Also gone was an equally vintage Kenwood Receiver. I forgot to empty out the CD player, and unfortunately Mr. N’s merengue music was inside. The recipient was clearly not up for returning them, making some silly excuse that she couldn’t find them. In it’s place I have a little bookshelf system (on sale, 60% off) and the improvement in sound quality is awesome.
Two things happen when you start lightening up the amount of ‘stuff’ you have, at least for me. One thing is that I want to and need to keep doing this. I have two households worth of things and it’s really overwhelming. I do NOT like clutter and so everything is jammed into cabinets out of sight, but not out of mind. So I am on a roll.
The other more obvious thing is selling your stuff. I’ve sold two things on Ebay already, and I have two more things up for sale again. I wanted to replace two of my cameras, and essentially I will have financed both purchases by selling things that are usable and have used sale value. Now that I’ve got a bit of a decent track record as a seller (very good reviews) it should make selling other stuff I have easier.
Probably the more difficult thing to unload are books. I tried Cash4Books and so far out of a dozen of my books, only two would be accepted by them, and for a mere pittance. The demand for these is fairly consistent across the several online sellers that I tried. Previously I tried Alibris and had them listed with other resellers, but nada, so I’ve begun to Freecycle those as well. Some are eagerly taken, others just sit there, unwanted even with no price and no charge. Amazingly many of my required books for business school are grabbed up, but ancillary reading materials are not. Ironically I found those books to be the most interesting.
Who ever thought that a book on business mathematics, including solving first degree equations, linear equations and applications, exponential and polynomial and logarithmic functions, matrix algebra, etc. could be so in demand, but apparently so. I even just Freecycled an Operations Management book, which for anyone who has taken a course in this, knows it is not fun reading. Who knew?!
