Taking back my garage

A couple years ago, Levi and I rearranged much of our house, and a lot - a LOT - of stuff ended up in the garage. I always swore I would never be one of those people who have too much stuff in their garage to park the cars, but guess what...yup. For two years.

*Not my garage. Ours is twice as big, and probably definitely worse.

So anyway, in preparation for moving out of our house at some point in the nearish future, we decided to have a garage sale. And to have a garage sale, you need a garage. We've set the dates - July 23-24, mark your calendars! - and now we need to start busting our butts to sort through everything, decide what stays, what sells, and what gets thrown out immediately.

The original plan was to spend ALL day on Wednesdays sorting junk, as in theory we've arranged it so we both have Wednesdays off in July. Unfortunately, things rarely go according to plan - our very first Wednesday, I ended up having to work most of the morning, and when I got home, Levi was down with a migraine. We finally got started around 2:30, and put in a couple hours work before we had to pick up Josh from daycare. Here's what actually got accomplished:

• I thinned my book collection by about 1/3 (this was not technically a garage project, but it was something to work on while Levi wasn't feeling well, since I'm still on crutches for another couple weeks)
• Levi dragged in, and I sorted, three good-sized boxes of miscellaneous...stuff. I think one entire box was full of old McDonalds Happy Meal toys. I chucked them all in the Toy bin for the sale, and will probably either label them 10/$1 or free. :)
• Brianna made a good start on cleaning her room. I told her anything she donated to the sale, she could have (most of) the money for. She cleared out three shelves of her bookcase and came up with a stack of untouched activity books, several outgrown computer games, and a bag of too-small clothes.
• Oh! Also not garage related, but I cleared out an entire glassware cabinet in our kitchen. Out of that cabinet we kept 14 coffee mugs (2 sets of 6 and two individual mugs with sentimental value), three measuring cups, one small baking dish, and a dozen cool plastic drinking cups. We moved out at least a dozen random coffee mugs, half a dozen insulated travel mugs, and TWENTY SIX MORE of the cool plastic drinking cups. Cause, they're cool and all, but do we really need thirty eight of them? I don't think so. That cabinet is BARE now. I love it. ;o)
  

So that's it, so far. We've got three more full Wednesdays (plus the entire week before the sale) to work on this project and a LOT of garage left to tackle. Wish us luck!

*P.S. I'll try and take some before and afters for a future post. :)