Like many people, I look at those TV shows which focus on hoarders and laugh. I wonder how anyone could live like that.

Then I head into our basement and sit in my recliner because the loveseat and other chair down there have boxes upon boxes of stuff on them. But I don’t have a problem. Those other people do.

You see, I have carefully chosen things for those boxes in order to sell them at a yard sale. I created those stacks in order to make some extra spending money. Ignore the fact that the stacks have sat in the same place for two or three years. That’s an inconsequential detail.

I really have wanted to have a yard sale to get rid of some of the clutter, but yard sales start so early in the morning. We also didn’t have a table to hold all the things we could sell. Plus we needed to go through the attic since the boxes in the basement only represented a starting point.

In other words, I not only had lots of junk, I also had lots of excuses.

But the process actually started recently. I went and bought a table to store items at home so we could actually build up an inventory in one place. We went through different parts of the house to gather items we didn’t need any more. Then on Dutch Days, we rented a table at a group yard sale a block or so away from the activity downtown.

I ended up filling two tables with all kinds of stuff – curtains, stuffed animals, coffee mugs, board games and more. Three boxes never left the house because I didn’t have enough room. At the end of the day, we did not sell a whole lot, but that didn’t really matter that much to me. I got over the hump.

Now we have plenty of items not only set aside for a future yard sale at the house or with another group, but almost all of the items have prices on them. That process alone makes me much more confident that we will actually move some merchandise when the next chance arises.

I really hope that happens because I discovered a new challenge I had not anticipated when I started putting things aside a few years ago. Well, I may have unconsciously known this would bother me, but it never really bubbled to the surface.

My legs and back really hurt the next day. I carried boxes from the basement to the car from the car to the yard sale table and then repeated the process. Of course, a yard sale at the house would remove one part of this process, but that’s still a lot of lifting.

I just hope that the memory of my sore calves doesn’t return me to my complacent state. I could easily block out the sight of the table full of boxes for a few more years. Maybe I should draw dollar signs on the side of them? That might get me motivated.