Man… I must be getting old. I don’t remember getting our last house ready to sell being anything like this nightmare.

So we’ve spent the majority of our last week’s worth of free time just trying to clear out the house so that it looks halfway like a house someone would want to move into. The advice on house selling seems to be “empty every possible thing out of the house until you barely have a chair to squat in or a pot to pee in.”

So, in that vein I’ve been trying to clear out my office/workroom. It’s not going so well. So far I have packed up seven medium boxes (medium basically being boxes about 15″x15″x15″ or so). I’ve packed up most of my tools, supplies, terrain, miscellaneous stuff and anything else that will fit in a box that size without falling out the bottom when you move it.

And the room is still full of stuff. It’s like stuff is breeding in the room while I try to clean it out. I still have all of my miniatures in their foam trays, hundreds, probably thousands of blocks cast from hydrostone, two bookshelves full of books, a bunch of airplane models, plus too much else to describe. I have decided that what I need is a dump truck.

And that’s just ONE ROOM. The Cosmic Wife is working on the kitchen and has emptied out every crevice, nook and cranny and put back only what is deemed “necessary” so there are more boxes full of kitchen stuff that we desperately needed at one time, but now can “live without” as we try to sell the house.

Now I need to rent a storage unit to hold all this stuff while we try to fix the house up enough to sell it. We’ve got to fix the walls up, probably paint most rooms, clean carpets, etc.

And we are doing all of this so that we have the rare privilege of selling the house for 3/4 of what we paid for it. Or maybe even closer to 2/3 of what we paid for it.

It is almost certain that for us to sell the house we will have to actually bring cash to the table, essentially PAYING someone to take the house off our hands.

Man… And then we will have to move into our new house, a house that will likely have far less room to store stuff. In the end I’d guess that 3/4 of the stuff we put into storage will eventually get donated to Goodwill or thrown in a landfill.

That is all assuming that even if we bring several thousand dollars of our own money to the table we actually CAN sell it. There is no guarantee.

If it wouldn’t wreck our credit for years and potentially open me up for being sued, I would probably just empty the whole house, toss the keys in the driveway and drive away…