Garage Sale Update

I'm a bit late for my post-garage sale update, but things went well. We sold a lot of stuff and only hauled one trunk-load of things to Goodwill afterwards. The weather was nice. It threatened rain both days but didn't follow through, so there were no soggy messes to clean up.



We sold much of our furniture to a nice Congolese family from down the street which means we are now without a couch or chair. Our evening Netflix insta-queue sessions have gotten rather uncomfortable but I guess we'll live. I wonder how long it will take my dh to find a new sofa once he arrives in the south...

We of course immediately spent our hard-earned cash on a few new/replacement items we were needing. We're still finding things that should have gone in the garage sale, but it's mostly straight to Goodwill for them. Basically, it just feels good to be done with it.

Garage Sale Prep

Six weeks until we leave for South Carolina, then another four before our hop over the pond. Since we are downsizing to a two bedroom apartment, we have a lot piles and piles of stuff to get rid of. This inevitably leads to the dreaded garage sale. Yep, this weekend is it. The Garage Sale. So, my days are spent sorting and packing. (Or at least that is how they are supposed to be spent.)

There are boxes of stuff that weren’t unpacked after the last move that I’ve had to pull out and sort through. Drawers and shelves have been emptied. We’ve cleaned out under our beds. And, MoMo has cleaned out her room. Which is miraculous! But, this means that our house is being choked by all the junk that has been pulled out. I’m hoping that after this weekend the task of packing will seem much less overwhelming.

But to get there, I first have to make it through the Garage Sale.

The begininng

So, three years ago, my husband and I decided to drop everything and go to graduate school. We packed up the kids, quit our jobs, and moved to the other side of the mid-west. At that point, I thought we were completely nuts (as I suspect most of our friends and family did as well). Would it be possible to support a family of four on the income of two graduate students?!? The answer, as it turns out, was yes. We’ve managed to get by, and honestly, the jobs we left weren’t great, financially speaking, so combined with holds on our student loans, and some other cost cutting measures, we didn’t feel too much of a pinch. We’ve all made new friends and rooted ourselves in the life of this mid-west college town.

The hitch? We’ve known from the beginning that this move was only temporary. Although, I still have YEARS left to go on my PhD in French, my husband finished his MFA this spring. The plan three years ago, heck, the plan until three months ago, was that at this point, the four of us would head off for a year in France while I taught English through an exchange program run by the university. Although we had survived three years of grad school on our meager salaries, we realized that one part-time salary might not be enough to support four people in France. Combine that will my husband’s eagerness to re-start his career and my son’s reluctance to attend a French school, and our trip for four turned into a trip for two, my fourteen year old daughter and I.

Although, this is not the beginning of our dreaming, nor the beginning of our preparation, nor even the beginning of our travels, this is the beginning of the chronicle of our year in southwest France.