Crunch time arrived. All the wild excitement of selling, buying, renting, exploring a new suburb had eventually to subside and the nitty-gritty had to be faced. It was time to actually downsize.
Lawson’s
When I whined to friends about having to get rid of quantities of large furniture, someone said: why not just send it to Lawsons? Lawsons is an auction house in Sydney’s Leichhardt. I checked their website and was heartened by the slogan: ‘So the kids don’t want it? Selling to other people’s kids since 1884.’ This sounded exactly what I needed.
A field trip was in order. I set out with a keen friend one morning to inspect the auctioneering operation at Lawsons. We even registered to bid and obtained little cards with bidding numbers on them. Wandering through the massive warehouse full of dusty cast-offs, we found everything from vinyl LPs to teaspoons to art works to stacks of furniture of all sizes, eras and tastes. There was a life-sized model of Elvis Presley. Rugs. Lamps. Objets d’art. We visited on Furniture Auction morning, and watched carefully as the live auction began. The auctioneer stood at a pedestal. I believe he actually had a gavel. He took bids from a motley crew of about a dozen live bidders as well as online bids and the occasional telephone bid, these last relayed to him by a phalanx of digitally-connected assistants. It was weirdly fascinating—the high prices paid for what we dismissed as junk, and the low prices paid for things we thought were a treasures. There seemed no rhyme or reason to it at all. Stalwartly holding off on any actual bidding, we retired to a Leichhardt café for a latte, convinced we’d stumbled upon one of Sydney’s fascinating sub-cultures.
Still enthused by the concept— ‘selling to other people’s kids!’—I emailed off a list of my large furniture pieces to Lawsons. Would they take these on consignment? How much did they think they might be able to get? The estimates came back disappointingly low. So low, in fact, that even if these meagre profits were realised, I probably wouldn’t earn back the cost of freight to the auction house. Time for Plan B.
Advice from New York
Serendipitously, The New Yorker recently re-published a Feb 2022 article by staff writer Patricia Marx titled “A Guide to Getting Rid of Almost Everything”
I studied it closely, alert for useful tips, for How-To advice.
‘Some will have you believe that the hardest part of parting with your belongings is choosing which items must go. Not so; saying goodbye is easy. Finding new homes for your stuff is the challenge.’
I was gaining first-hand experience of this maxim. I did what everyone else did and started listing my stuff on Facebook Marketplace. There I encountered new ‘friends’ who would happily take my stuff if only I would send them several hundred dollars in advance, for freight, which the freight guy would pay me back in cash when he turned up. Yeah right.
I learnt to be wary of people who responded to my ads (especially for the more expensive items) at 1 or 2 AM. I became adept at cutting off extended back-and-forth messages about the precise condition of my item—which was offered for free. I was careful about revealing my address to random people on the internet, especially those who asked to come at 8 PM at night, or who suggested I could meet them somewhere to hand over a three-seater sofa. It’s the wild west on the internet, and no-one is willing to pay more than chicken-feed for second-hand furniture, no matter how much you love it.
Patricia Marx: ‘Tip: Life is not ‘Antiques Roadshow’.’
Giving it away
I learnt the hard way that my precious stuff is worth practically nothing in the world of used things. So next came offering things for free. Still difficult. All those sites online which encourage you to recycle, pay it forward, save things from landfill? When you get down to the details, no-one will pick up large items, except maybe a couple of St Vincent de Paul or Salvo shops, and only then if you book four weeks ahead and wait to see if they will take the item.
Patricia Marx: ‘People divesting themselves of quantities of books (and this applies to LPs, too) often start by thinking, Oh, boy, I’m going to make so much money selling these precious volumes!, and end up saying, ‘I will pay you any amount of money to take this shit off my hands.’’
That was me—with one memorable exception. In my garden shed I unearthed four dusty file boxes full of nearly 900 Walt Disney comics from the 1960s to the 1990s. Yes, I was once a collector; don’t judge me. I hauled the boxes out and began to sort and catalogue and research online. A guy from Gumtree paid me $500 for the lot, no questions or arguments. He was a nice guy. Told me he was a dealer who sold things like these comics at specialist collectors’ fairs. Judging from the fact that he didn’t argue about the price, I concluded that the comics were in fact much more valuable. However, a bird in the hand is worth more than four boxes in the shed.
Vintage Walt Disney comics—worth a motza?
One late surprise, mere days before the moving date, was the ease with which I managed to give away 72 volumes of Law Reports. You wouldn’t think that anyone could want an out-of-date set of Intellectual Property Reports—in fact, I can’t remember why I wanted them in the first place, but they’d been on my shelves since 2008, the year I left the office. After spreading word of their availability to props companies and craft sites, someone said they’d love to take them. ‘They’ll look nice on the spare space on my bookshelves’.
Spare space on bookshelves? That’s whole ’nother world.
Could Marie Kondo help?
For Christmas, I was given a copy of a Marie Kondo workbook. I was a little surprised. I have a lot of stuff, it’s true, but it’s all perfectly organised. But, the gifter explained, perhaps Marie has some tips on how to downsize? Hmmm. I peeked into Marie’s principles. First, she advises, don’t de-clutter by location. Work by type of item. Gather together all your clothes, say, or books, into one place. Start there. Then look them over and decide which of these items really give you joy and should be kept, and which can go (Marie is silent on auction houses and Facebook Marketplace). Now, I’d already reduced my clothes, and I have 4,800 books, so it wasn’t practical to put all those in one place. But I decided to try the Marie Method on another class of item: artificial flowers and fruit.
Fake flowers: I don’t know why I have so many, but they give me ‘joy’
I was completely astounded at how many of these I had. Every room yielded several examples. Why? What was this extraordinary attraction of artificial flowers? Weird. But I postponed the psychoanalysis and gathered them all together on the back verandah. Two things happened: they looked so sumptuous, so luxuriously gorgeous massed together there, that my ‘joy’ in them was increased three-fold. Secondly, my house seemed suddenly bare and lifeless without them. I decided to keep them all. Thanks, Marie.
The idea of grouping things into types appealed to me though. As I sorted my cupboards I produced little piles of similar items. Candles. Coasters. Lamps. Masks (ten of them—don’t ask). The constant question which kept arising was not so much ‘Do I want to keep this?’ as ‘Why in hell do I have this?’
Writer Andrew O’Hagan is eloquent on this desire for stuff:
‘What I most wanted was a SodaStream. A person with a SodaStream was in charge of his destiny to a pretty awesome degree. Same with the Breville sandwich toaster. Instead of a slice of Scottish Pride smeared in beef paste, you could go your own way, killing it softly, taking over the kitchen and incinerating a few squares of plastic cheese and a bit of ham in a sarcophagus before hitting the street like the god of modernity. Guys like that had lava lamps. They had a Casio calculator with trig functions in their schoolbag. These items remain, but with other things, the sense of lost desire can be strong. The future is always behind us, or at least it seemed that way in the days of the space shuttle and the BBC Micro: they could memorably explode or freeze in the middle of the day, reminding us of the relation between obsolescence and novelty.’
Andrew O’Hagan, ‘A Cosmos Indoors,’ The London Review of Books, 21 April 2022
I mused on this existential explanation as I packed my lava lamp.
Lava lamp: it’ll suit the new house, right?
The Council Clean-Up
I alighted on the most effective disposal method. I booked a ‘Council Clean-Up’, one of those monthly dates where the local council sends a truck around in the night and takes away more or less anything you leave out by the curb. There’s a downside: the truck takes it all to landfill, which is both environmentally to be avoided and also seems a very bad thing to do to ‘good stuff’. However, there’s also an upside. One’s neighbours are on to this. On Clean-Up night, vans and SUVs and cars towing trailers can be found cruising the suburb, drivers hopping out to pick over the piles of other people’s junk. It’s an excellent kind of secondary economy. I don’t know what they do with the stuff—some may use it, some may re-sell it, some may hoard it in their garages. For me, the reward is a mini-inner glow of passing on something useful to someone, plus avoiding the nasty land-fill thing, coupled with a gigantic sense of relief when I look out at the empty nature strip the next morning and NEVER HAVE TO THINK about that stuff again.
This time was a super-clean up for me. I began piling things out on the street from about midday. The cruisers soon arrived. I could hardly carry it all out fast enough before it was being picked over and shoved into vans. I met some interesting people. One lady told me she always liked to come to my clean-ups because I threw out ‘good stuff’. ‘You used to have a café, didn’t you? I still have those lovely glass jars you used for tea!’ (I once had a bookshop café. I gifted her my memoir about the shop, copies of which I’d been trying to off-load in my Street Library for the last few weeks.)
A burly chap with a van already crammed with stuff asked me if I needed any help hauling things out. He offered to carry things. The scavengers (I mean that in the nicest possible way) are always keen to see if ‘you’ve got anything else’. Another chap became excited over a camera box, which sadly didn’t contain a camera. But he asked if I had any to sell (I do) and we arranged to email about that deal. An older lady (a grandma?) took away the baby sterilizing equipment, the spare nappies, the cot bedding and the nursing pillow (the baby in our family has grown). As I was chatting to one person, another would pull up—‘Has anyone taken that small table?’
I kept a careful eye on the pile as the evening darkened. I’d put out a few things I wouldn’t have been happy to see go to landfill. I was prepared to retrieve them from the pile if they weren’t collected by the neighbours. But they all were. The pile shrank to a mere fraction of its original size, and the Council truck took the rest. Mission accomplished.
The Big Things
Still, I had a big old antique dresser. Several sofas. An armchair. A heavy wooden tallboy. I swore to myself that never again would I invest in furniture that was (a) big & heavy, or (b) expensive. From now on, I would only purchase second-hand furniture. That was more environmentally sound, anyway. I thought of all the lovely mid-century modern pieces that are for sale everywhere …
In the end, I arranged to leave the Big Things in the house. The new owners agreed to take them. Mentally, I moved from indignation at the suggestion that I gift them my good furniture for free, to gratitude that they would kindly take my stuff. After all, in this whole situation, they were the only people paying good money for anything.
Patricia Marx: ‘Tip: A major perk of death is that you don’t have to clean up after yourself. If you can’t muster the courage to deal with your three storage units, leave the contents to your heirs. Mention in the will that there’s something valuable in one of them.’
What about the books?
If you want to start a debate, ask people who read about their book collections. You’ll find some who ruthlessly discard books once read, others who insist that e-books are the way to go, some who prefer to keep their books pristine and others who fold down corners and mark notes in the margins. For practical purposes, most sensible book lovers keep a close eye on their library, hanging on to only those books they particularly love, or might want to re-read or consult. Bookshelf space is valuable real estate. Who has room for a home library?
Well, I do—in a room formerly known as a bedroom. For me, a home library is dream come true. I’m a read-them-and-keep-them bibliophile. I’m with Umberto Eco, who is said to have owned 50,000 books:
‘It is foolish to think that you have to read all the books you buy, as it is foolish to criticise those who buy more books than they will ever be able to read. It would be like saying that you should use all the cutlery or glasses or screwdrivers or drill bits you bought before buying new ones. There are things in life that we need to always have plenty of supplies, even if we only use a small portion.’
Umberto Eco in his library
The packers arrived. I apologised about the number of books, but asked if they could please label the boxes ‘Fiction’ or ‘History’ etc. ‘No worries,’ the guy replied. ‘The other day we packed up for an archaeology professor who had 6,000 books. We had to label them alphabetically!’ Hmmm. I slipped away to ask Bill, packing in the library, to label alphabetically. He said he’d do his best.
Where are the labels, Bill?