As y’all know I recently sold the house I raised my children in after making the decision to move away from the Buffalo area. The process of going through 23 years of memories and accumulated stuff was at times a tremendous relief and at other times pert near the hardest thing I have done as an adult..be it married, divorced or single parent..As I was going through the process I was forced to make some decisions on possessions. Do I keep and move with me, give to a friend, put into storage, throw away, or donate to a local charity. I don’t know how well I did in this decision making, but will definitely have a better idea once my stuff arrives.
Now my kids need not worry, Dad did not get rid of all your things. Heck there stuff was the hardest to go through. No matter how many of my friends I asked, it seems none of them had a need for plaster casts of y’alls hands, so I still have those. Most of my tears of joy at remembering were your things. I’m pretty sure I remember all the clothes y’all wore while being clueless as to why I had 3 leather jackets of different shades of brown. Plus why did I have all those 40 and 42 inch waist jeans and shorts?
However, when all was said and done, I still had clothes, furniture, books and stuff which I wanted to donate. So I started the process of finding good homes for my old things. My first chin scratcher had to do with men’s clothing. For some reason Church clothing pantries aren’t hurting for men’s clothes. They all wanted kid clothes and any winter coats, but pants and too small for me golf shirts just weren’t big ticket items. My books were not “hip” enough for the new age book stores and too explicit for Church Libraries. Finally, I realized that there really isn’t a place to give away all those late night infomercial purchases. You are going to have to do some homework in order to donate your stuff.
In the end I had great success with AMVETS and Goodwill. They not only were an outlet for much of my things, but they thanked me for donating. Kid’s clothes went to local Churches. Infomercial stuff went to an odds and ends store way out in the country. My only complaint involved some furniture I tried to donate to Salvation Army. I did not know that they only take furniture they can resell in one of their stores, and a tear on the lining of my couch disqualified it from being donated (find out the rules before you have them show up to remove your things). However, the men loading the truck did haul the couch to the curb and an add on craig’s list “free couch/bed, first come first serve” had that thing gone in no time.
As I write this blog post, the things I did ship from Buffalo will be arriving in less than 24 hours. That will pretty much occupy me for the next few days wondering why I brought this and not that. So y’all know what I will be up to. Now go do what you have to do to…
Make it a super Day,
Kevin
Related posts:
