Moving tips - trash donate or sell

 

Home Moving Tips – Trash, Donate or Sell?

November 14, 2012 By KimTucker Leave a Comment

Whether hiring a professional moving company or inviting friends and family to help with your move, there are some things that only you can do before anyone arrives to help. Because what you are moving belongs to you, only you are qualified to make the decisions needed about what to move. Begin with the end in mind and consider these options:
Donate or Sell. Obviously the easiest thing to do is donate anything you don’t want to move. Simply go room to room, closet by closet, drawer by drawer and make three piles: Keep, Donate and Trash.

1. Garage Sale. If you want to try to get cash for things you won’t be moving? Have a sale! If you are having a garage sale, that will require some work on your part: moving things to the garage, pricing them, and advertising. Schedule the garage sale date and make sure you have completed the house clean out and pricing well in advance of the sale. Local papers usually have a garage sale section you can advertise in if you like or just putting up signs in your neighborhood works great. Pick a nice sunny day and your in business.
2. Estate sale: If you are selling all or most of your furniture items this is a good way to do it by allowing people to go through your house. We do recommend hiring a professional if your doing this type of sale. Estate sales are much more involved and it’s best to have a professional that does this all the time to handle it for you. Contact someone like Judy Johnson of Unexpected Treasures that deals wit this sort of thing every day. She can walk you through the process.
3. Selling Online: If you have enough time, you can sell things online. Of course this option also requires posting your items on Craigslist or Ebay. If you don’t want to mess with mailing things to people Craigslist is your best option.
4. Consignment: If you have furniture items that are in good shape you can take them to a consignment shop and they will sell them for you. Items have to be in good shape or be an antique that they can move quickly. There should be consignment stores near you. For a local option we recommend Home Consignment Center in Mountain View, CA.
5. Donating or giving away: There are many worthy charities some pickup and others you need to drop off. And of course there is always Freecycle where you can post items for free.

Whichever option you choose, you will be able to do it better depending upon how much time you have before the move date. If you are pressed for time, get help!
Is your project too big or you don’t have the time? Consider hiring a professional organizer someone like Amanda of Kuzaks Closet can take care of it for you.