We had a garage sale yesterday to try and get rid of the mountains of stuff which fills up this house. We need to downsize in a serious way to fit our lives into an apartment, even a largish apartment.

It is obvious that we own much more stuff than we sensibly need. While we are not hoarding stacks of newspapers along the hallways, we do hoard stuff which we do not use or will ever use. A large house allows you to do that. Neither of us want to do that anymore. Possibly we're kidding ourselves.

But back to the garage sale. I advertised it in our local paper last Thursday (don't get me started on the simple exercise of placing an ad with Cumberland Newspapers, by the way a subsidiary of my husband's employer - relevant people have been whined to). The garage sale was advertised for Saturday 9 am - 3 pm. On Thursday night, with the kids asleep and us in our 'jamas watching tv in bed, there is a knock on the door and an unseen person (Big Jay opened the door) asking to view our furniture. What the...?

The sale was a reasonable success. We made around $600 which is nothing to sneeze at. However, we were left with lots of stuff we didn't manage to sell and now have to store, throw away, donate or sell on Ebay (not the top option). Luckily the ugly rusty trampoline was taken away by gleeful neighbours once we put a "FREE" sign on it and left it on the front lawn. A half dozen boxes of books and videos were dropped at the Lifeline book sale this morning (going to a worthy cause - believe it or not, given my general dislike of the human race, I was a Lifeline counsellor and trainer for five years... I KNOW!).

It's always the things you think no-one will buy that go first. Jason's rusty old tools were fairly popular. As were his Beatles books which were all snapped up in seconds. The beautiful wooden furniture which we acquired over many years and loved dearly and were willing to sell at ridiculous prices are still with us, barely raising any interest. Go figure.