One Man's Trash...

It's that time of year where people start to do spring cleaning. Air out the house, clean every surface, dig up spring and summer clothes, pack away winter clothes, make sure the lawnmower, edger and weed whacker are working, try on last year's summer clothes with slightest trepidation to see if they still fit, clean out your house's basement and sell some of the stuff in a garage sale.

Spring cleaning is all of this and more. But the main aspect of it I'll be focusing on, and what I truly believe in a sign of the approaching summer...is garage sales. As the title of this blog post suggests, with garage sales, one man's trash really is another man's treasure.

I can't tell you how much stuff in my house is from garage sales. The jewelry box I keep all of my earrings and necklaces in is from a garage sale. Some of the horse figurines in my room are from garage sales. And recently I've bought nine books from numerous garage sales that I've stocked up for the summer. Albeit they are all older books, they are still well worth the read, and the price too. Most of them are under a dollar. Even some of the furniture in my house is from garage sales. Also I recently bought five rubber stamps from a garage sale that I use in my crafts, significantly less expensive than Michael's or Hobby Lobby.

So is the low price tag and never-knowing-what-you'll-find aspect of garage sales the main allure of them? I know at some garage sales I've found special items that I hadn't expected, or my parents snagged a good deal. Or maybe it's the fact that each garage sale is an elusive glimpse into the lives of complete strangers. To some degree you can tell how each family lived by the stuff in their garage sale. You can pick out their lifestyle, their interests, their hobbies, their personality and their habits. Now maybe I'm reading too much into it, but to some degree it's true. You can tell so much about the people that hold a garage sale you visit, just by looking at the stuff they have there. For example, if they're selling outdated furniture and old appliances you might be inclined to think that such things were in their basement for a long time, or they're finally updating everything. Or if they have a lot of collection type things like baseball cards or old records and such you might be inclined to think they were once childhood treasures that have lost their purpose. No matter what each garage sale says about the people who run it, they are perhaps inadvertently placing their lives on display for a short time, allowing people to make assumptions and observations about their life. After all, each piece in a garage sale had to mean something to someone somewhere along the line, and has either lost it's value or has been replaced by something better. Now maybe all this analyzing is coming from the writer in me, but as I've said before, each blog post comes from my observations of the world.

This summer my parents are planning to host a garage sale to de-clutter our basement. Our house is very small at only 1,200 square feet so you can imagine how clutter plays a huge factor. About a month ago all of us sorted through Rubbermaid boxes and placed everything destined for the garage sale in cardboard boxes. There were boxes for each of us, my mom, my dad, my brother and me. Like I've said before with items in a garage sale losing their purpose I found the same thing to be true with me. For instance there were Cd's of groups I once loved, but now found I outgrew them, or books I no longer wished to read. There was an entire box filled with horse figurines from my childhood that I sorted through, keeping some only for sentimentally. This ties into my mentioning about each item meaning something at one time, but over the years losing that purpose and now that item waits to mean something to someone else. And it's not that the items my family and I have destined for the garage sale are no longer useful, it's simply that we no longer have any use for them, but no some other family will.

I am exited to host our first garage sale. I know a lady in Reedsville who runs a horse rescue farm and she is crazy for garage sales just like me and promised to stop by. Perhaps there is a sort of cleansing aspect to garage sales. A way of getting rid of the clutter that had once meant so much to us a time long ago in our lives. Perhaps such notions put a perspective on all of our childhoods, how the most trivial and small things meant so much to us, but now that we're older we find how truly small they were, and how simplistic our pleasures were.

With that said :), I hope my view on garage sales wasn't completely abstract and indiscernible, but that I simply provided my sometimes off-kilter view on the world around me. If you love garage sales, drop me a note! Perhaps while perusing the classifieds and running around Sheboygan and the like I'll see some of you.