Scavengers Unite!

There was very little in the way of work for me on Friday, plus it was 75 degrees outside and sunny, so at 8:00 a.m. I opened all of the windows to air out the house, rolled up my sleeves and started cleaning from top to bottom to patio to garage.

Fact: The average household contains over 300,000 individual items. Because we're thrift store junkies, we have about twice that much stuff. I was in the mood to try to pare down to the average 300,000, so I went through the storage room and the closets and sorted everything into three piles:

1. Keep.
2. Stuff that can't be recycled, reused or repurposed (i.e.,garbage: Broken printers, old mops, etc.)
3. Stuff that can be recycled, reused or repurposed, just not by me.

I put away the stuff in the first pile, took the second pile out to the garbage, and set up the third pile in the alley on the handy concrete slab in front of our garage, a bunch of flotsam and jetsam and bric-a-brac for passersby to scavenge:

I seriously considered having a last-minute yard sale. The panic and adrenaline would be a rush after spending so much time in front of the computer, but as the morning wore on and I got tired and a little overwhelmed, I came to my senses.

Later that afternoon, the pile had dwindled somewhat:

The people in our neighborhood, us included, are vultures. We love picking through other people’s garbage. I’ve got all kinds of stuff around the house that I found abandoned in one alley or curbside or another.

By Sunday afternoon:

In the end, I only had to take a tiny carload of stuff to the Goodwill, and that was well worth not making $53.14 at an impromptu yard sale.