I don't want to talk about the lamp.

Last night, our treadmill left us. Tonight, our bedroom set, part of our living room set, and my Law & Order: Special Victims Unit DVD collection will walk out the door. As great as it is to be paying off debt and putting aside money with the proceeds of these sales, it's hard to watch this stuff leave and have our house looking as though we either just moved in or just have no furniture, when just a few months ago, we purchased the last piece and considered it officially "done". Sad. The fabulous brown room only had a 6 month run.

On the other hand, it's kind of nice to be unloading things, one by one. It's freeing, in a way, to own less stuff and we're starting to realize just how much we DON'T actually need. For instance, we have 3 TVs in the house, but only use 2. We could probably get away with one. We'll remember that for our next house. We should probably never own plants. We buy a lot of books. We have way too much food in our cupboards to always be buying groceries. I should get rid of clothing I don't wear once each year. I sent 7 bags of clothes to goodwill and have two gigantic bins of clothes, shoes and purses for consignment. This closet space would have been nice to have. Why did I keep textbooks from every university class I ever took? I haven't yet had any reason to refer to even one of them. And why do we own 6 sets of glasses for the kitchen? And two blenders? Anyways, I guess we've figured out that we can live with a lot less than what we have, and I think we'll be making a point to do with less going forward. What is the point of having a bunch of stuff you don't need, want, or even remember?

I will be eternally grateful to online classifieds for helping us unload our stuff. I can't even imagine the days when I would have had to place ads in the paper. The two sites I've been using have been awesome, incredibly easy and very quick. I posted the bedroom set two mornings ago and received 40 e-mails about it within 12 hours. Obviously, it's a pretty good deal. Still, you can't beat their reach. However, they do bring out all kinds of idiots too, so my inbox has been a pretty big source of irritation for me since this whole process began. I'm not sure who's more annoying - the people who felt the need to e-mail me telling me that they can buy a BRAND NEW (emphasis not added) treadmill at Walmart for $400, so why was I asking so much for ours (because clearly, all treadmills are created equal), or the people who write you a sob story about how they are newly separated/single parent/recently experienced the death of a loved one, and would it be possible for us to part with our item for free AND can we deliver it to them? God Bless. WTF? Luckily, there are a lot of great, honest, informed people out there too, and I'm happy with the homes our stuff has found so far.

Because we didn't want to give up everything, we told ourselves that we could each pick a small piece of furniture to keep (to be stored at some unsuspecting friend's house). I picked the brown ottoman that I almost got into a physical altercation for at HomeSense last December, and Kurt picked his wooden CD cabinet. I'm not sure what kind of house we'll build around an ottoman and a CD cabinet, but I'm looking forward to rebuilding a home with all new stuff too. Who doesn't like new stuff?

By the time we move, I'm hoping that our "best of" stuff that we're keeping will fit in a bunch of Rubbermaid bins and that the rest will all be back in our wallets. I only have three weeks to make this a reality, but we're doing well so far, so I'm pretty confident that we'll be fine. So far, I've had the most fun going through all the pockets in my massive purse collection. Every time I get a new purse, I take the important stuff out of the old one, transfer it to the new one, and continue on, forgetting about all of the other, less important stuff in the previous purse...until now. Good times. Other notable finds have been Kurt's old photos, enough hair elastics to last me the rest of my long-hair life, and probably enough loose change to offset the cost of Kurt's plane ticket. Excellent.

We have one hell of a garage sale coming down the pipes...