Sorting through sell, keep piles

My two daughters, ages 25 and 22, and I have been working on The Great Yard Sale Project or Why There Is A Gigantic Pile of Junk in the Middle of the Dining-Room Floor.

And let me tell you, there's nothing like yard-sale prep to bring a mother and daughters together.

There's always the potential for a massive clutter explosion in our house at any time, and I realized there could not be true clutter control unless we tamed the spaces where the most clutter resided: The girls' (former) rooms.

Cue scary music here - da da dah.

My older daughter is married and a mom herself and she'd done a great job of packing and clearing out when she left home. Closer inspection, however, revealed boxes of costumes, notebooks and leftover wedding stuff still in her room. (Had we forgotten to send that box of 50 invitations?)

My younger daughter is a college senior in Birmingham. While she has learned to hang up her clothes and put trash in the trash can instead of under her bed, the road to neatness is long and perilous - and filled with dozens of half-filled storage boxes.

So I offered them a deal: We'd have a yard sale, and if they cleaned out their rooms and contributed to the sale, they could halve the profits.

Sold. They were enthusiastic and eager to help.

But when my older daughter started tossing her old school pictures and the bows we'd saved from her wedding and putting her art work and dance costumes in the sell pile, I started to get nervous.

"Do you really want to get rid of these?" I said, holding on to a box of wedding cards and guest lists. "You might want to put them in a scrapbook to look at someday."

She just sighed and said if we were going to declutter, we had to be ruthless - and I could add her old CDs and jewelry to the sell pile.

Luckily, she didn't see me add the wedding box to the mom-can't-bear-to-get-rid-of-this pile instead.

On the other hand, my younger daughter's sell pile wasn't growing very fast.

"Do you really want to save these?" I said, pointing to a box of posters and prints. "You've never even hung them up."

She just sighed and pointed out that maybe someday she'd have the perfect spot for the old coffee advertisement and the 2002 Renaissance Faire poster and you never knew what might come in handy sometime.

You know what? They're both right. We ended with a good mix of selling and saving just in time for our yard sale this weekend - and I can make you a great deal on some posters.

Cathy Wood is a freelance writer living in the Shoals. For more from her, visit TimesDaily.com.