When selling your home there are basically three things you can do with the contents, give it away, throw it away, or sell it. I did all three of these and I think throwing it away worked the best. Giving it away did get rid of some stuff and selling it was okay for some things but it takes a lot of time. Where I'm living in Colorado it appears that used furniture is not worth much, I tried selling it on Craigslist, but very very few people were interested. I tried giving it away and pretty much had the same response. So a lot of it ended up at Goodwill. The odds and ends around the house like dust collectors, pictures, decorations, and such did a little better than the furniture but not by much. Now you're probably saying to yourself, But Boondork how about yard sales, moving sales, garage sales? Well the truth is I refuse to spend my weekends sitting outside schlepping my goods to people who show up with a five dollar bill in their pocket and expect to leave with a car load of stuff and enough still in their pocket to take all six of there kids to McDonalds. No offense to you yard salers out there I just didn't have the time or the patience. Unlike the household stuff, the hobby stuff did great. Most of it was sold to friends and friends of friends or on Craigslist and eBay. EBay did especially well for me, I sold a lot of my hobby stuff for more than I paid for it 20 years ago. I'm not kidding I sold some things that were 10 years old, had been used and went for more than you could buy a new one for today! The problem with eBay is it takes a lot of time and packing up and shipping the stuff is not fun, but the money is great. What I learned from this is, if you have a choice between buying a Randall knife or a sofa,--- sit on the floor.
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So where was I? Oh yeah, I need to sell my house. On June 24, 2015 I went and talked to a Realtor and she explained to me all the things it was going to take to sell my home. There was a lot of things I needed to do but the most difficult thing was going to be getting rid of all of my stuff, Because I had a lot of stuff. Most of the stuff that was my biggest concern was my hobby stuff, I was a gun collector, and a shooter, a re loader, a knife collector, a picture taker,[I hesitate to use the term photographer] I fished, I hunted, I RVed, I did some woodworking, and I did most of the maintenance work on my truck the house and the RV. All of that amounted to a lot of stuff. By the way I also had some furniture. No matter how much I loved my stuff it still had to go, because no amount of love was going to make it fit into my trailer. In a movie a long time ago someone said "if you love something let it go", there was more to the saying than that but that's the only part that fits what I'm doing. So I let it go and a lot of it went to eBay, and I couldn't believe it but there were people out there that loved my stuff more than I did, and you wont believe how much more ! I guess I will start with the sale of my home, because that's when it really hit me that I was going to have to change my life. I had known for a while that my financial situation was changing and continuing to live in my home of 20 years was no longer going to be possible. This didn't bother me so much because I had already grown to dislike long winters and deep snow, when I was younger it was kind of fun but now it was getting difficult to deal with. So changing my life and moving on seemed like the thing to do.
I had always realized that living in the mountains of Colorado has a serious downside, which is called winter. I live at an elevation of almost 9000 feet and the winters here go from about mid October till about mid April. Now don't get me wrong, I love Colorado and I can't think of a better place to be in the summer, but the winters are just no longer fun for me. So what to do? it's pretty obvious that someone like me needs two places to live, Colorado in the summer and someplace warm in the winter. But if you can't afford two homes you have to make compromises, and for me the best compromise seemed to be full-timeing. I already had plenty of RVing experience so I knew what living in a trailer was going to be like and I had always enjoyed it. I have talked to a lot of full-timers over the years and virtually all of them said that they loved what they were doing, and their biggest regret was not starting sooner. All of that sounded good to me and it seemed like the perfect solution to my problem. But it means I have to sell my home and get rid of almost all the stuff in it. The thought of that didn't sound like much fun to me, and I was right ! |
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