De-cluttering the House – Phase Two

As you all know we have been in the midst of an epic journey to de-clutter the house, a journey of both epic proportions and huge psychological conundrums. I say epic because it doesn’t ever seem to end and conundrums because you end up spending hours holding objects in your hands arguing in your head, do I really need this, yes I do, why? This internal argument can go on far longer than your ability to maintain a desire for de-cluttering the room, trust me, many days have ended to the sound of the clichéd “I’ll finish this later”.

So there I was the other day, a rain soaked windy day heralding the inevitable arrival of winter, a day when venturing outside the house is only desirable if absolutely essential. As there is at present no essential reason to go and get cold and wet I turned my attention to the front room. The first thing that struck me was that Mark has always had a habit of slipping DVDs into the shopping cart, a new release here,  one from the bargain bin there, or even a box set whilst proclaiming how much we will enjoy watching it and that it is an essential buy. I am sure you have had the same experience, and thus the experience now facing me, a wall of DVDs, we have hundreds squirreled away on shelves, in piles and on top of things. This will not do! Time to thin the herd, weed out all those films that as the credits roll we looked at each other and mumbled “Well there goes 2 hours of my life I can’t get back.”

Time…                                                   to thin…                                         the herd…

A quick flick through the piles highlighted around 50 DVDs that we deemed “a waste of money”. Neatly stacked we looked at the new pile and wondered what to do with them. “EBay them” said Mark as he wondered off thinking that he had discharged that job successfully, a short sharp “No” brought him to a halt. Now, I am the eBayer in the house, this task falls to me and I love doing it, the thrill of selling something you no longer want coupled with the lottery of how much you will make, for me it is addictive. Though as with chocolate cake, you can sometimes have too much of a good thing, and listing 50 DVDs, most of which will probably only sell for the 99p starting bid, and for some they probably wouldn’t even make that, coupled with wrapping 50 parcels and dozens of trips to the post office, this is definitely far too much chocolate cake for me.

Time for the cliché… “I’ll finish this later”.

Then a case of serendipity hit me, musicMagpie wrote to me to ask me to highlight their new service for buying our old DVDs, I couldn’t help but smile to myself. What a perfect timing! With all my buying and selling online it actually didn’t cross my mind to look into services which specialize in helping you “recycle” your unwanted goods for cash.

So if you are thinking of starting your own epic journey, or just want to clear out some DVD space so there is room for the new ones Santa Clause will bring you, or just wanting to raise some money that doesn’t involve a payday loan at 5000% APR, give this a thought. Selling dvds online is a great way to earn extra cash  and with Christmas just around the corner I bet we all need all the help we can get. Ok, you probably will not get the full money you could selling them yourself, but that is more than offset by the convenience, time and effort saving, hassle free life style, not to mention the “job jobbed” satisfaction feeling.

*Post written in collaboration with musicMagpie.