Moving Sale and Final Pack-out
Friday morning, October 6, we went back to clearing out the house, making final repairs, and getting ready for Saturday’s planned yard sale. I spent a few hours on the roof installing the vent and ductwork for our kitchen stove. When we had the new roof installed just before Christmas, the contractors thoughtfully removed the existing stove vent and roofed over the hole. I had been putting off cutting a hole in the new shingles and putting in a new vent as long as possible, so now was the time… The job ended up not being nearly as bad as I had thought, but it was still a pain.
We also started getting ready for our yard sale. I’d placed an ad in the local newspaper the week prior, scheduling our yard sale for Saturday morning October 7. So Friday afternoon we set up some tables and benches out on the front lawn and started hauling out all the stuff we wanted to sell off. It ended up being quite an assortment – all kinds of small “collectibles,” kitchen stuff, almost all of Winnie’s potted plants, some of my workshop power tools and yard tools, small furniture items, and even a few of the small carpets. I also made up some signs with our house number and arrows, planning on setting them out early next morning. I really didn’t have a feel for how many people might show up, if any at all.
Next morning I got out just before 8:00 am and put up the signs along Westgate parkway. By the time I returned to the house there were about a dozen cars parked in front and people EVERYWHERE! Winnie was overwhelmed, and a bunch of men were picking though my tool selection. Winnie made the mistake of leaving the front door open when people started showing up, and I discovered to my horror that people were wandering all though the house. One women, standing in our living room, offered $75 for a piece of furniture we’d only purchased a few months earlier for over $300. I politely but firmly threw everyone out of the house and closed the font door. Then I went out to haggle over my tools and helping Winnie. It was like dealing with a bunch of vultures.
By 11:00 the mob was gone, even though we had stragglers dropping by all afternoon and even though the next day, Sunday. Once the mobs thinned out Winnie and I took turns watching the front lawn and working around the house.
I spent the next day loading up our trailer with stuff for the final trash run to the town dump, and sorting out things we wanted to leave behind for a local Charity. Winnie continued to pack and clean house. By Monday morning the trailer was loaded down with trash and we had a good stack of stuff staged for Charity pickup. I hauled away the trash, returned home, and reloaded the trailer with things to bring up to Virginia.
I planned on using the trailer to haul my remaining tools and boxes of books – the really heavy stuff. I’d hoped to save some money on moving costs this way, and also use the trailer for tool storage while we were living in our apartment.
My final repair job was putting a pair of glass cabinet doors on the kitchen cabinet, as per Winnie’s design. I ordered the special glass door hinges via mail order before our apartment-hunting trip, as they were simply not available in local stores. The hinges were waiting for us on our return, so Monday afternoon the doors went on. This job finally finished out all the storm repairs in our kitchen that were started over a year earlier.
