It’s not hoarding if it’s books!

So, we made some more progress on clearing out the house today. We got more things boxed up, and some shtuff thrown out (yeah!) and some shtuff sorted.

My wife has been putting a lot of things in the ‘sell’ pile. This is all fine, well, and good. Except that not all of it is likely to sell. Up until now the wife has been adamant that we can recoup the money spent on these items, or at least much of it. It’d be nice if that were the case. But I think there are many items that would only sell in a garage sale situation, and things do not go for top dollar in garage sales. Heck, people argue with you over paying fifty cents to a dollar for something at a garage sale. Garage sales aren’t so much about making money as just plain getting rid of stuff. Although, when I sold my house a few years ago, I had garage sales I still nobody bought most of the stuff I had for sale. The majority went to Goodwill, and they got so sick of seeing me come to donate they told me to stop coming.

The wife is suffering from a psychological principle called the Endowment Effect. People endow items with greater value than they are worth because they have found the item valuable. Which is good, but other people are not necessarily going to place the same value on them. And unless you can find someone else with the same idea of the value of the item as you, it isn’t likely to sell.

Then something occurred that I didn’t think would ever happen. The wife uttered the words “I think we should take a lot of the sale items and donate them to Goodwill.”

Glory hallelujah! The heavens opened wide and light shined down upon us!

That will help get some of the shtuff out of the house. And hopefully help out some folks that may need the items.

But then, there’s the downside. My wonderful wife has let me spend the money I make from selling my books at Half-Price Books on more books. Not all of it, but some. I’m trying to be more selective and I have passed on a number of books that I might have otherwise acquired. She also took me to Half-Price Books for my birthday and let me go on a shopping spree. Again, I passed up a number of books I would have liked to get and tried to be very selective. And I worked on keeping the overall expenditure down as much as I could.

In addition to the above, as I was going trough the boxes of books to sell to Half-Price Books in the first place, the wife said I could keep ‘one or two books’ from each box if I really wanted them. Again I was very selective, and yes, I may have kept more than two books from some boxes. And I may have kept the entire paperback collection of P.G. Wodehouse books a friend of mine gave me. Considering I had to get rid of half my library, if you tell me I can hold on to some books I’m going to try to hold on to as many as I can!

Anyway, the wife walked past the bookcase where I’ve been squirreling away the books I selected to keep and those I bought on recent runs to Half-Price Books. Oh, and the couple of books I got for Christmas. She looked at the stacks and said ‘You’re keeping all of these?” To which I replied “Yes. You said I could keep them.”

Well, after some … discussion … I packed up all the recent purchases and the Christmas books. (Although I found one Christmas gift that wasn’t in the stacks that needs to still be packed.) That leaves all the ones I pulled out of boxes before they made it to Half-Price Books. I may have to pare them down still, but I will put that off to the last possible second.

I’m getting to hold on to the P.G. Wodehouse, since I haven’t had a chance to read any of them, until I can read one to see if I like them. I saw part of one episode of the Wooster and Jeeves series starring Hugh Laurie and Stephen Fry and enjoyed it, so I’m fairly certain I’ll like the books. I’ll have to move one of them to the top of my ‘to be read’ pile. Which one, which one?

The struggle continues, my Hordeling.

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