Having a garage, tag or yard sale is one of the best ways to get rid of the clutter and make a few extra bucks at the same time. Start by going through the house room by room and sorting everything into keep, sell and donate piles, advises the Wholefully blog. As you complete each room, price everything in the sell pile and move it to a staging area for the big day. Then, contact ClothingDonations.org to make an appointment (or two) to pick up the extra stuff you want to donate, and whatever stuff doesn’t sell.
Tag: charity donations
Stage a Successful Memorial Day Garage Sale
A few of Café Mom’s top 10 secrets to a successful Memorial Day garage sale are location, good signage, fair prices, clean stuff, advertising and organization. Also, don’t put something out if you don’t really want to sell it, the story says, and don’t be seller who tries to sell the same things every weekend. Be ready to haggle if you want to make some quick cash, and if something doesn’t sell, “either throw it out or (if you think it’s really good), donate it.”
Make Your Garden Grow
Over the Easter holiday or spring break, you may have noticed that things have started to bloom. Trees are budding, and spring flowers are popping up from the ground. And now that the threat of a frost has finally passed for most locations in the United States, it’s time to plant a garden you can enjoy throughout the year.
First, you’ll need to spring-clean your yard and garden plots. Clip any dead foliage or withered tree branches, and rake the thatch from your lawn. Doing so gives new branches and shoots the room to grow and flourish, according to the EarthEasy sustainable living blog, and you need to clear a path before things can start to grow in earnest.
Then comes the fun part: planting seeds and seedlings. Depending on your space, climate and needs, you might plant containers for a balcony, a sculptured perennial garden that has new blooms every month, or a raised vegetable garden—or all of the above! Better Homes & Gardens offers a plan for virtually every situation, space and skill level.
If you’re new to gardening and on a budget, there’s no better place to shop than at the local thrift. Donations to ClothingDonations.org include lightly-used trowels and other tools, decorative clay pots and containers, and other garden items. When they’re resold, the money goes toward helping fund veterans’ programs throughout the country.
Early spring is the best time to plant new trees and shrubs. It’s also a great time to see hardy flowers such as pansies, irises, daffodils, tulips and hydrangeas come up. If you missed the window to plant early-spring flowers, get summery perennials such as day lilies, black-eyed Susans and roses into the ground, and start preparing your pots for herbs and annuals.
If you want to eat fresh produce from your own victory garden (as many older veterans might remember their families doing during WWII), plant crops such as lettuce, spinach, radishes, carrots, raspberries and peas early in the season. RealFarmacy offers a zone-by-zone list of late-April garden to-dos that can help establish a productive vegetable garden.
As with spring cleaning, the keys to a good garden are organization and elbow grease. When you figure what you want your outdoor space to look like, it will be easy to make the time and space needed to plant and cultivate the flowers, shrubs and vegetables you want. Get started now, and you’ll be able to enjoy your garden all summer long.
Things You Can Trash Immediately
The decision to trash things carries with it a blissful immediacy. There’s lots of stuff people shove into a drawer and keep that’s of little use to anyone. So, throw out or recycle the old magazines, orphaned socks, takeout menus, plastic cutlery, mystery keys, half-used cosmetics and other items that are only cluttering up your home immediately. If something is unopened, in good shape and could be useful to a new owner, however, donate it to ClothingDonations.org, and you will help fund valuable veterans’ programs.
Go Beyond Decluttering by De-Owning
The Becoming Minimalist blog says it isn’t enough to declutter; for a lasting effect, you must “de-own” the things you don’t use. Why? Because only improving organization won’t encourage you to make tough decisions or decrease your desire for new things; often, it will just sort them into a place where they are temporarily out of sight. “Carry a trash bag from room-to-room,” the blog says. “See how big of a donation pile you can make. It doesn’t matter so much how you remove [these items], as long as you do.”