As I’ve mentioned before, the wife has many toys leftover from her kids when they were growing up. The kids don’t want them anymore (they’re both minimalists now) so we’re putting the up on eBay.
We have finally made it through the many boxes of toys spread across two rooms of the house. We’ve photographed every toy (from multiple angles), we’ve researched them to see what they are and how much they might be worth, and the wife has listed them on eBay.
Since she’s put them all on eBay, she’s sold several of the toys, two of them within an hour of listing them! Hopefully this trend will continue and we can clear some space in the house.
There is a minor drawback with the process. We do not have boxes of the appropriate size for mailing things out. I have a number of small boxes mainly because I’m selling mass market paperback books and DVDs. A few of her toys will fit in them, but most won’t. We used to have a Half-Price Boxes in Houston, which was very convenient. If we needed a box, we’d measure the toy, find the right size box among their standard shipping boxes, and go grab one. Not so much in our new home.
We’ve got a shipping store (sort of like a UPS store) but they don’t have a lot of selection on the types of boxes they sell. (The wonders of Small Town America). Neither does the local Walmart. The nearest large chain office supply store is thirty minutes away in the next town over. I can order boxes from Half-Price Boxes online and have them delivered to the house, and we’ll probably start doing that so we can have them ready when something sells on eBay. But in the near-term, it isn’t a viable solution.
The kicker is that I had a large number of boxes for just these situations when we were in Houston. Unfortunately, they didn’t make it up here to the new house. I don’t know if the movers thought they were leftover packing boxes, or if the wife and everyone helping her thought we didn’t need them. My fault for not being as organized and having everything packed before I had to come up several days before the wife did so I could be here to meet the moving truck when it arrived. Otherwise, all those boxes would have made it up here and we could be using them. Hindsight and all that.
In the meantime, the wife is getting her stuff to sell. Me, not so much. Part of what I have online is old horror movies on DVD that belonged to her first husband. I’m not a horror movie fan (as stated many times before) and the wife rarely, if ever, watches anything twice. (She’s seen all of them already). If I like a movie, I’ll watch it repeatedly. There are twelve movies that I try to watch each year, one for every month in the year. These are the foundational stories that are at the very core of my being. I think the only horror movie I’ve seen more than once (by choice) has been The Lost Boys. I saw part of the Last Man On Earth, starring Vincent Price, when I was eight and it scared he crap out of me. Likewise, Carnival of Souls. I did watch both of them much later in life, just so I could see how they ended. Still creepy, but not as much as when I was a kid.
It could just be timing. Maybe folks don’t buy as much horror the rest of the year that isn’t around Hallowe’en. Or it could be that DVDs aren’t selling anymore. I can’t even find them in Walmart. It’s a dying technology, and just about anything you might want to watch is on streaming somewhere. The same goes for books. Unfortunately the younger generation doesn’t believe in dead tree versions of the written word. I shall persevere though. I trust that there are others like me that like to own the movies and books they consume and don’t want to be beholden to corporate overlords that can revoke access at any point.
What’s your favorite method of clearing out your old unwanted items, my Hordeling? Leave a comment and let me know.
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