Sell The Kids Clothes | Stephanie Middleton | 52 Week Money Challenge

It's a Boy... Sell the Girl Clothes! And more about organizing.

This week we changed it up, Stephanie Middleton recorded her first every Video Podcast to discuss what she has been learning!

Some Key Points From the Video!

• Having a basement full of boxes is overwhelming, but you have to start somewhere!
• We are living proof that Annalisa Sawatzky is right... "Owning less can make you Happier".
• Organize everything into 3 piles. Keepables, Sellables and Giveawayables.
• My wife loves to keep kids clothes, I think she said "8 containers" of kids stuff, however what she should have said was "8 gigantic Rubbermaid containers packed full of just girls clothes" AND "7 more tubs of boy clothes"
• So far Stephanie has made over $100 selling kids clothes to friends on Facebook!
• It won't be perfect right away, but if you keep at it you will make progress!

Here is a picture of Stephanie recording this podcast in the office we made in the basement (after cleaning out all the kids clothes).

Transcript

Hi I'm Stephanie Middleton and this is my first video podcast.

Since Jax has been the voice of the blogs so far, with a little bit of my help, I wanted to take this opportunity to share with you what I've been learning.

We have just begun week 8 of our 52 week money challenge and so far my main focus has been to organize everything.

I really love being organized, however having young kids and keeping up with day to day life doesn't leave a lot of spare time for projects. We seem to have accumulated a lot of stuff in our 7 years of marriage. Since we began this challenge, I have been using every spare moment to go through our boxes and figure out what we have.

Coming down to a basement full of boxes with no idea what's in them is very overwhelming. But I decided to push through and take it one box at a time. I started by throwing out all of the garbage, like empty boxes and cardboard to clear some space.

Then I grouped things into categories. Give away, sell and keep. From there I have been finding homes for the keepable items and started selling the stuff we don't need. As I kept clearing out more boxes I got on a roll. I felt like I was accomplishing a lot and I could visibly see a change. I cleared out so much space that we could set up a desk and living area in our basement for Jackson's office.

Also in the process I realized that 1/4 of the space was consumed by baby and kids clothes. Since we weren't done having kids yet, we've kept the clothes from our 3 children, Emma, Magnus and Hamish. We have our fourth child on the way, due end of June and we just had our ultrasound and found out we're having a boy and we're going to name him Fergus Daniel Middleton.

<< I couldn't resist inserting a picture of Fergus here >>

<< Please resume reading the Transcript >>

We're pretty sure we're done having kids after this one, so we'll keep the boy clothes for Fergus and sell the 8 containers full of little girl clothes.

I've been able to sell about 3 containers so far, making about $100 just by posting pictures on Facebook and opening our house to friends for them to look through the clothes. It was nice to go through Emma's clothes and remember what she wore. I let myself keep a small bag of the favourites for her to give to her kids.

I've been working at this and organizing other stuff for over 3 weeks and still have a really long way to go but at least it's getting done and each day is getting better. When we originally posted the picture of how unorganized our basement was and how much stuff we had I was really embarrassed but I decided not to let that hold me back.

<< Here is the picture of the basement Stephanie was referring to >>

If you're finding yourself in a similar situation, here's a word of encouragement: start somewhere, you can do it! It doesn't have to be nor will it be perfect right away, but if you keep picking away at it you'll be able to look back and see progress and that's a good feeling.

Thanks for watching and thanks for keeping up with our 52 week money challenge. Talk to you next week!

Previous Blog Posts

Here is a list of all the blog posts so far in our 52 Week Money Challenge Series!