Our garage sale when it was fresh and new. (There were more items down the driveway.)
We had our first garage sale, and it was awesome — thanks to ALL YOU GUYS and your super-helpful tips…
Category: home Page 1 of 2
Hey look! It’s our garage full of stuff to sell.
Since I moved in, Mike and I have been talking about having a garage sale. We keep planning to have them on certain weekends, and then changing our minds. Our problem: We’re not exactly sure how to have a garage sale.
- What are the best days to do it on? Saturday? Sunday? Both?
- How do you advertise it? We don’t want a million people showing up, because we don’t have that much stuff. But we don’t want to waste our time.
- Do you price things beforehand? Or just let people suggest prices, because they’re going to anyway?
- What time should it start? I hear people might show up early anyway.
Who has some advice for us???
“And you may find yourself living in a shotgun shack
And you may find yourself in another part of the world
And you may find yourself behind the wheel of a large automobile
And you may find yourself in a beautiful house, with a beautiful wife
And you may ask yourself-Well…How did I get here?”
No seriously, HOW DID I GET HERE?
It’s like a woke up one day last week and didn’t even recognize my own life. Things I used to always have, gone. The routines I used to do every single day, gone. Even major self-identifiers, gone.
Where are all my things? Where is my furniture? Where’s my DVR full of my favorite TV shows? Where is that god damn mason jar I use to make dressing? (I can’t find that thing, it’s driving me nuts.) Who am I if I’m not self-described bad-ass, independent bitch, who lives on her own, and doesn’t depend on anyone but herself? Who am I if I’m not the girl who lives behind a porn shop in the quirky apartment that she decorated all herself?
Don’t get me wrong — I’m definitely beyond excited and happy to be living with with my partner. But, I find that I’m struggling with living with someone who owns a house for a lot of reasons…
I’ve been way too busy to write anything except for work and Yelp reviews for movers and contractors. But I’ve had a couple moments in these first few days of the move to write down a couple quick mental status updates. Here they are…
Hi. We live together now. In this house. Together. This is my home. This is my life. #pinchmeimdreaming
Day 1 of officially living in Mike’s house: I still don’t think the reality has quiiiiite set in yet. Even though, this morning I was officially waking up “at home,” my first thought was “okay, what do I need? Do I need to walk back home at any point today? Or can I stay here?” Old habits…
I still can’t believe that I have no other place to worry about, or consider. My brain and life is no longer split into two. My cat, my man, myself and all my belongings are all in the same place. It feels amazing.
Empty apartment living room and dining room.
Day 2 of officially living in Mike’s house: I still had to go back to the apartment to take my eat a “goodbye” breakfast with my parents, and then take them to the airport, and then cancel my cable, and then my internet, and then grab the few living plants that remain on my balcony.
And then that was it. I left.
And I don’t think I have any reason to go back (except for when my parents come back from Maui).
Day 3 of officially living in Mike’s house: This was the first morning where I didn’t wake up and think “okay, what do I need? Do I need to go back to my place at any point?” I guess Mike’s place already feels like my home base. I didn’t expect that to happen so fast.
Although, as you can see, it still hasn’t switched from “Mike’s house” in my brain to “my house.” But the more I unpack boxes and create my own spaces, the more I’ll go from Mike to mine…
Things are trucking along at an alarmingly fast rate over in Move-in Renovation Land!
In the last, what?, week our contractor has torn down the bedroom closet and ripped out the back of the laundry closet. Then re-built a new bedroom closet and pushed back the laundry closet wall 7 inches, in order to accommodate a regular size washer and dryer.
Soon that empty laundry closet (that I think looks like a TARDIS when the blue door is shut) will be filled with these babies…
Over on Offbeat Home, I showed off some of my minimalist bedroom inspiration from a real estate listing. One of my wonderful Homies asked to know more about my actual bedroom. So here it is (keep in mind that it’s still a work in progress)…
How to achieve this look:
Can you see the coffee table in this photo? Just barely right? Yeah, me too. Constantly.
That barely visible coffee table situation is actually the Top Stage Clear Acrylic Nesting Lucite Side Table Set arranged in a semi-circle, on this too-small-but-passable jute rug.
Both of these — because of their dinky-ness and their ability to completely disappear from my vision enough for me to forget they’re there and then continuously get scared by the shiny appearance of a translucent table at my feet — are going to be just temporary. I’m eventually going to have to get a bigger rug, and then I’m thinking the translucent tables are DEFINITELY going to look too small for the space.
But… as the days go by, I’m growing quite fond of my weird coffee table situation — shiny table-induced heart jumps aside
One day I looked around my apartment and all the stuff that had made my house feel like a home started to make me feel entombed. All the tchochskies, the books, the toys, the furniture, the art, even the rug under my feet — curated, collected, and displayed just so — all started to feel like “too much stuff.” I felt like I was living in an episode of Hoarders — the overly decorated edition.
I thought about culling. I thought about starting a donation pile. I even got rid two or three bags of clothes. But the moment I would start on the rest of the place, I would promptly get overwhelmed. What good is this tiny dent going to make when this whole two bedroom apartment is full-to-bursting with SHIT!?
I remember thinking, as I edited a post about an apartment fire, “I wish I could just burn it all down and start over.”
A few months later, I kind of did…
That guy I married likes to joke that it’s because I’m a Leo (a fire sign) that I’m OBSESSED with fire places. My best girl friend Jessica makes fun of me for freaking out EVERY TIME there’s a fireplace at an open house. The house could be a dilapidated wreck, reek of cat piss, and have zero character, and I’ll always go, “OOH! There’s a fire place!”
My parents fireplace.
So when I spent a few days at my parents’ house in Texas last month, I barely moved from in front of their fireplace. If I could have gotten INTO the hearth, I would have. Seriously, this was my “office” for the trip…
Old and busted: Boring white shower curtain.
New hotness: Danica Studio’s Odyssey shower curtain.
Head over to Offbeat Home to read more about my new shower curtain purchase. And THEN note the comments where our readers alert me to all the amazing matching home goods in this magnificent pattern!
