Well, most of our STUFF was purchased either at Garage Sales or on eBay, and my wife has the uncanny ability to remember the price she paid for EVERY LAST THING! So yeah, she has a pretty good idea what an item CAN fetch, if the right buyer happens along. I think my strategy with her is going to be: every time we finish a room, we need to "dress" it for sale, staging furniture and a few key decorative items, all of which we'd sell with the house or at a pre-sale estate sale, and then we close the door and leave it closed. Until now the process has been to empty the room we're going to work on by moving all the stuff to other rooms (making them unusable for the piles) and then when the room approaches completion the stuff from the next room flows into the finished one. I'd like to sequester us to using just four or five rooms of about the size of a house we might pick at TV. Stock those rooms with just the items we are likely to want once we move (or an equivalent of something we might replace it with in FL). Wish me luck with that!
I certainly understand the cathartic release by getting rid of things that have been weighing you down. And agree with the idea of holding onto the pictures rather than the things. A few months ago I went through my high school yearbooks and took pictures of several of the pages and then threw the books out. It was tough to put them in the bin, but when the truck dumped them I felt a huge relief, like I'd been carry those thing around in a backpack and someone just took them out and I felt like I could dance. I had been carrying those 8, super-heavy books around for about 10 moves over decades without ever looking in them but feeling responsible to keep them. Why? A lot of my friends thought I was crazy for ditching them, others applauded me. I applauded me. And more importantly it freed me up to look at other stuff and say "if I could get rid of my yearbooks, I can easily get rid of X". Digital pictures are small! So are MP3s. I have hundreds of Cds but I can't remember the last time I put a CD in a player. They are all digitized and live in my computer/phone/ipod so why do I still need those stacks of plastic? We are going to have one helluva yard sale this spring!
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