TrashedHouse.com

Part 8: Preparing for the move out

Unlike most people, who simply hire a big van and have all their stuff moved from A to B, we had decided to go back overseas and take a break after all this hassle. This meant that shifting everything wasn't really an option so we would need to sell off most of our stuff.

If we'd had more time, we could've made quite a bit on eBay, but we'd had enough and just wanted to put this part of our lives behind us. So we decided to sell locally instead.

Car boot sales seemed like the first best option to take. After a bit of enquiry, we found that there was one very near central Croydon on Sunday mornings. So we loaded up the car on Saturday evening, all ready for an early start - we'd been advised to arrive as early as six o'clock.

In the event we got up a little later, but were still there by 7.15. It took us a little while to set up our wallpaper tables to display our stuff to best effect, but we thought it would be worth the effort. Others didn't seem to be bothering very much; most just piled their stuff any old how. (And some of the junk they were selling had to be seen to be believed!)

We managed to shift quite a lot of our things on the first go, but with just over £40 to show for freezing our backsides for nearly six hours we decided it wasn't an experience worth repeating. And with no garage and no front garden to speak of, holding a sale in front of our house wasn't really an option either.

Kay hit on the idea of leafletting the other residents of our street with a list of our remaining major items. This was a real brainwave, as it turned out - before we'd even finished delivering our leaflets (to about sixty houses) David's mobile was ringing. Most of our remaining stuff was sold by our last but one day in the house; and most of our buyers were happy to wait until the final day to collect their purchases, so we had a few remaining home comforts right up until our departure.