2017 No Scavenge Clear the Death Pile Challenge

I would be interested starting in February but right now I don’t want to miss out on all of the inventory people are getting rid after Christmas and New Years resolutions….

You sound like me, ChristineR- my garage is (death) piling up too. I’ve already started my “thrifting abstinence”. At least until Jan 31, which is our area Goodwills’ 50% off day 😀

I’d love to, but I don’t want to miss out on great inventory. I am trying to avoid larger items though. I’ll buy good shoes and clothing items all day long because they are easy to list/store/ship. I’m being more picky with bulky items lately. Just yesterday I decided not to purchase this sweet Rock-a-santa thing. The box was just too big for me to justify storing it for up to a year.

I can always just raise my minimum list price to reduce my purchases. I already pre-research every item before purchase so I’m not exactly buying dead inventory.

I’m definitely going to be reducing thrift trips, working on death piles (some items will be listed and some will be donated) and improving inventory management. It won’t be a total true “no scavenge” month, for sure, but I need to get more things out (sold or donated) than in.

I’m in. I can’t say that I won’t make a trip to the thrift stores, but I can easily avoid auctions and yard sales this time of year (they just don’t have many auctions and yard sales in the snow are about no.) I have plenty of piles of death around. I just got a small photo box light set up so I have some new motivation to get listing. Well, listing once some work in the house is wrapped up. That is currently our priority. Just wrapped up the painting, now working on putting down the flooring. Fingers crossed we are moved in by mid-Feb.

I’m in, but it’s sort of unfair, because next week is the last auction until March in my area! :/ One of the local thrift stores is closing down in January, (owners are retiring). I am going to stop by tomorrow to find out when their last day will be.

After that, I guess I’ll be forced to list death piles until early March. 🙂

I’m all in! Well, with maybe an occassional slip-up? I have a hard time running my weekly errands without seeing something I can flip. :-). But Christine you are reading my mind. A really interesting challenge would be to see who can keep from bringing home a single newly scavenged item the longest. (Excluding things like the wonderful chair with footstool and pillow plus big framed art piece that I scored for FREE this week, of course!)so we have to tell on ourselves if we fall off the wagon. I hope I won’t be the first!

Ugh…Came across a local auction house that is going to be doing an auction of THRIFT STORE SURPLUS!!! That is a double dose of temptation! Thankfully it is on a Friday night and I have a new wood floor to prep for sanding that night. But seriously, thrift store surplus auction. I feel like Homer Simpson near a donut right now.

d’oh!

I haven’t been to my local auction in over a month, Every Sunday at auction time, I look at the piles of stuff in the living room and just won’t go… Something has to change.

So.. I’m in the process of converting my spare bedroom to my listing office. This is where I will do listing only. The room I freed up in the garage is going to become yet more shelf space. Today I’m going to home depot to buy wood to build a freestanding 6′ by 3′ freestanding shelving unit which should hold 12 size able bins.

The garage will be for shipping and storage only now.

This will allow me to move attack the death piles and go on a “List it” or “Donate Purge”. I have so much room here to run my business.. I just need be be better organized.

I have about 1450 items listed now. I really need 4000 to hit my goals.

I am in the same boat and accept the challenge! I have been refraining from thrifting for a few weeks now until I get all my other inventory listed AND do some decluttering of my own personal items by way of listing. I must say it is not near as much fun as thrifting but it has to be done. Plus I am looking at the amount of expense money I will be saving while I’m in my period of abstinence, as a motivator. I would say I have about 1,000 items that I need to get listed, mostly clothes. Trying to whittle it down a little each day.

The house distraction works! At least for the buying side of the equation. 😀 This weekend was all about tile and I worked on that for 13 hours over two days so I didn’t get time to do much else. I did go and look at a light fixture that someone was selling on Cragislist, but that will be for the house. I had a thought that I could make a “quick” stop at the Goodwill, but I just went on home and put the hour into getting the tile down. It will be nice to get through the death piles when I can focus 13 hours on it over a weekend. Soon though, soon.

I’ve changed my mind – no more buying for January for me. I have too much to do and too much stuff already.

Okay, I confess I gell off the wagon once last week. Spent $26 at Savers. My car dragged me there for going by too close. Some of what I bought was for me though. But I am checking myself back into Scavenger’s Anonymous Rehab. Meanwhile today I took photos, then spent hours identifying flatware patterns–ugh. That’s one reason I got a deathpile of flatware–it takes forever to identify and clean up. Especially the silver. But the last batch I did was well worth it! Back on the wagon!!!

I’m currently on month #2 of limited buying for Ebay. We’re already 10 days into January, and I’ve only spent $16 on stock so far this month! Starting to feel the anxiousness about buying wither away…if I really want to buy something, I just look at my death piles and think “nope!” It feels just as good to open up old boxes of items and sort through them. It is like buying them again for a second time.

I’m hoping to continue this for the rest of the year. It will have to be really good to have me spend a bunch of $$$$ on something at this point, but I’m sort of not feeling it at this point. I’d rather save than spend.

Okay, I have my death pile destruction goal date of June 3rd. The local United Way teams up with the local University and the students donate clothing and hard goods for the sale. This year’s sale date is June 3rd so I have my target! Last year over 40 TONS of stuff was donated and some past years they had over 70 tons! It is a bag sale and last year it was $20 for a large cloth grocery bag full. I know it is still nearly half a year away, but I’m already excited for this event. I anticipate I will have my death piles cleared out well before that, but at least I know my final date.

That’s an awesome motivator! About the same time our subdivision of 1000 homes has its annual garage sale. You’re on!

Ha. We could post photos of junk we re-donated. Tons o’junk.

photos of death piles would be cool! Then you can show progress along the way (first there were 10 piles, then 9, and so on).

I’ll be here cheering you on!

I’m joining up! My goal is to take an informal inventory of how many items I have sitting around unlisted and then figure out when I can have them listed by. I’ll post that when I get it figured out. My inventory is a mess! Right now I have three items that sold that I can’t find.

I’ve been watching a lot of Youtube videos lately which have influenced me and spurred me on to join this challenge. The videos fall into two camps. A couple of people are like personal trainers and hearing them say to quit buying stuff if you aren’t listing it all!!!! has sunk in my brain. The other group of people whose videos I was watching are eBay reseller hoarders. They shop and shop and do haul video after haul video and hardly list. They keep talking and talking about how they don’t list but they don’t seem able to change that. It’s really depressing and I’ve had to quit watching some of them. So I don’t want to become that! Or if I am that I want to stop. So here I am. No more shopping until I list my death piles. Period.

I listed three items from my death ‘piles’ today. I put ‘piles’ in quotes because I’ve really got more of a thin layer of inventory spread all over the house than a specific, organized pile. Three items listed, and hoping to squeeze in two more before everyone is home from school.

Went down to the new basement last night to take a picture of my death “piles”. This is actually a mix of listed and unlisted, but the majority is unlisted and donation items that need to get cleared out. All the brown boxes in the back are for a favor I’m doing for some family. My husband’s uncle passed away last year and had a massive model truck collection and this is a small number of them that I agreed to sell and the proceeds will go to build a walking trail in his community. Since most of this is stuff I WANT to list, I’m not sure it qualifies as “Death Pile”, but I just don’t have the time to list at this point……

I have other random unlisted items in various locations around the house that I just haven’t taken the time to pack up in the boxes. I had to get most of it “organized” and moved over when my parents came for Christmas since it was covering the room they stay in.

• This reply was modified 8 years, 3 months ago by shortandstout.

Posting here for transparency….went to goodwill and got 10 t-shirts for my t-shirt store. I only had a few unlisted t-shirts and since it is its own store, I decided getting a few wouldn’t be so bad. I will say that I spent $5 for the 10 shirts, already logged them into my inventory spread sheet, and have them in the wash right now. I have to go do some cleaning up in the new house to get ready for more tile work, but I have a bit of extra time today for item prep and photographing. I will get everything I have for the shirt store photographed today and have it ready to list as I get some time this week. My goal is 20 new shirt listings this week and 5 new listings for my main store.

The last auction I went to was January 8, and I haven’t bought any new inventory since. Woohoo! Then I checked auctionzip, and 2 new auctions have popped up -one in 2 weeks, the other the week after that. :/ It’s really tempting, because one of the plans for 2017 is to branch out to new areas. These are auctioneers that run auctions infrequently, too. Decisions, decisions.

I added 3 listings from one of my ultimate death piles: fabrics and linens. I buy boxes of this stuff, and then hem and haw about how to sort it and divvy it up for listings, (by color? fiber content? size? Ooooh, look, so pretty…I’ll just stuff it back in the box and not deal with it). In the future, I am only going to buy this stuff if I look at it and immediately mentally group it for a listing.

So I grabbed a box of it, made 4 piles of similar stuff, got 3 listed, and 1 has already sold for $30. Now I feel motivated to tackle another box of fabric.

I went a whole week without buying stock, only breaking it when I spent $14 yesterday. I am now considering thrifting again tomorrow, and going to an estate sale on Saturday. It is a slippery slope once you start buying again 🙁

I have been listing at least 1-10 items each day, sometimes 20+, sometimes 0. Still, I can see the new items already piling up and I need to process those right away in order to justify any new purchases.

I tackled my hoard of scarves and shawls this week. Photo’d all 38 Sunday. Listed 10 Monday and 15 Tuesday. Couldn’t list yesterday, but plan to list the last ones today. We will be going to visit the 4 grandchildren in Hong Kong next wekk, so the girls, all teens, always love clothes. They even love thrifted clothes. Everything over there is SO expensive. So that was my excuse to stop at Savers after dropping off a pkg at Fedex.
I filled my cart with tons of nice things, and did buy a few things to resell–only 3 or 4 items. Came home and removed tags and washed 2 loads–had to handwash some of them. I now hope I can fit it all in my suitcase! 18 items for the girls in their fav brands–so darned cute! And several nice sporty clothes for the 12 yr old boy. I always let the girls take turns picking what they want one piece at a time–it’s like Christmas. Can’t wait!
So far I haven’t been perfect, but the piles are going away at a nice pace. (As Jay says, it’s hard to walk past $20 bills laying around when you are in a thrift shop!) I sold two huge bolts of lace on auction for over $50 that had been cluttering up my sewing room for years. It’s nicer to have $50 in your pocket than clutter!

I’m a rock. No buying and no plans to buy for the forseeable future. I’ll likely roll this challenge right into February. I have enough on-hand to last me quite a while listing-wise. I’m also not listing right now due to so many other things going on. Still selling 10+ things a week which just makes more room in storage. Yay!

Keep it up everyone.

Well, one of my fabric death piles just committed suicide. I pulled out a big piece of vintage woven fabric, and the sheer black backing to it disintegrated into a fine, black dust that covered everything in the box. I debated washing all of it again, said “nope”, and dumped the whole box in the trash.

I did get 3 more lots of vintage linens listed before the other box did itself in. So, progress, one way or another!

I’m down to two t-shirts in my stack and I got 1 item listed in my main store last night and a draft ready for photos in the main store as well. Another busy weekend ahead with more tile, but I hope to take a break and get some of my larger items photographed out on the deck if the sun is out.

It feels good now that I’ve gotten used to the idea that I’m NOT going to thrift. There is a freedom to going out to run an errand and not having to make the decision to thrift or not..And it feels good each day when I ship to know that my pile has just been made smaller by that many items. It feels like a weight is being lifted and it literally is.

This weekend I’m meeting my sister for a day of thrifting and setting her up to sell on eBay. At first I was trying to figure out how much I would allow myself to buy until I eventually came to the conclusion I was not going to by anything! I don’t need to buy inventory just because I’m in a thrift store. I won’t use that excuse to buy.

Zero thrifting by ME this week, (other than the book shelf I bought for my son’s room), but my husband went thrifting without me, and brought back several items! Oh no!

I also dropped off several boxes at Goodwill this week, after I decided we are not going to have a yard sale. It’s too much work for too little return. I’d rather be the person that stops at garage sales than the person that has garage sales!

I’d like to say I still have a few hours left today, but I see it all going to the house. I met my goal of 20 shirts in the one store and then only got 1 item listed in the main store, not 5 like I had as my goal. I will see if I can squeak out another listing tonight. No postcards done despite doing nothing but watching shows on Hulu for most of yesterday. Just didn’t have it in me mentally to go work on the house or list, those days happen so I just try to regroup the next day if I can and move forward.

Got another 11 shirts today for this week. I counted up what I have on hand already and if I do another 20, I was going to be short. I figured since I met the one goal, I wouldn’t really be contributing to the pile in the long run.

Goals for the coming week: 5 items in Main store, 20 shirts in second store, 10 postcards in the third account. Sold a postcard today so that is a plus!

Happy listing to everyone!

I cheated this week, and stopped by the thrift store. BUT!!! I already have the 3 items I bought listed. I spent less than $3, and my $3 should bring me $75.

And it could have been much worse: I decided not to go to an auction tomorrow. I did a total re-org of my storage room, and once I had a clear picture of what I still had left to list? Yeah, I have plenty to work on here. I don’t need to spend any more money on inventory right now.

Finally got my kitchen counters cleared off today, too!

As I continue listing and continue not buying I’m seeing more bare real estate in my home which is feeling good.

Christine I have a large pillow doll to go with your strawberry shortcake sheets 🙂

Is anyone still doing the challenge?

It’s been 4 weeks since I joined. Little by little the landscape of my house is changing. I’ve sold a lot of things that had been sitting unlisted. Some were items that I didn’t think I should even list but given a chance before they got thrown into the donate bag they actually sold.

I’m not sure what the endpoint of this challenge will be for me. I want to hit a thrift store sooooo bad.

New pledge from me, a little late to the party. I have a 8′ x 16′ shed, a spare bedroom, one entire wall of the garage, and multiple bins hidden under benches and tables in said garage all waiting to be listed. In my store, only 100 items listed. And in the house, one VERY annoyed husband.

I’m DEFINITELY in! 😀

Christine this challenge has really helped me. As the piles go away I’m getting different ideas for how my workroom would work better. It’s getting easier for me to get rid of mistakes too. The more I do it the easier it becomes.

Don’t look now, but I am starting to run out of stuff to list! I am down to 4 piles of stuff: a box of glass photo negatives, a pile of Dell server parts, parts from my old dishwasher, and a pile of random “other” stuff, which is some of my son’s old toys, a few shirts, a cast iron pan that needs reseasoning, vacuum cleaner parts, a queen size bedspread, etc.

This is truly the stuff I have been dreading, because it will be tedious to clean and list.

I really appreciate this challenge, Christine! I got a lot of stuff listed, (and sold!), and it has made me think about the types of things I buy. I definitely am more selective now, because I dont want to deal with piles of questionable stuff again.

I’m out, temporarily. Had knee surgery and it’s worse than they thought, so I’m not listing anything at the moment. 🙁

Will get to it as as soon as I can.

Okay, I’ve fallen so far off the wagon that they created a tombstone for me on the Oregon Trail…..

Anywho, yesterday was 50% off all Goodwill AND an online auction. Also, I was told about a previously unknown to me thrift store last week. So….yeah, I’m buying. I am, however, getting more listing done AND my sales are increasing so items are still going up and going out.

Well I was on the challenge for a while..

Some may have noticed on another post that I recently bought about 20 boxes of NOS Hats, shirts and jackets. The death piles are much better organized, but, now I have Boxes and Boxes of NOS clothing death piles.

My main concern is listing. I need more revenue and I need to list. I’ve come up with a simple plan.. list 10 items a day…Every Single Day. Even with sales considered, that will give me at least an increase of 200 listings a month.

I need a workable solution and I think this is it. Some days I may list more than 10 and that is fine.. but 10 has to happen every day. That is my new pledge.. 10 listings a day.

I’ve got the clothing and a cache (hoard) of sewing patterns which need to go. I’ve also got a bunch of record albums and posters… There is really no excuse to not list my 10 a day.

I’ve also found that I need to scavenge at least once a week to keep my sanity and to grab the low hanging fruit…

Today I went to an estate sale and bought 5 or 6 items for $2 total.. when I was done listing them the total was $601. We’ll see what sells.. If I get half the $601, I’ll be a happy guy.

I love this country..

Learned about a new process for dealing with Death Piles and the logic works!

Get bins/large boxes and place them about. Slap a label on each one and sort your entire Death Pile inventory into each bin/box. All the women’s tops in one box, men’s shirts in another, jackets, coats, kids clothes, kitchen items, tchotchkes, each category has its own labelled box/bin.

When you’re done, pick one and sort it out again, this time by brand, then by item specifics. So.. using women’s tops as an example: all the Chico’s together, then by long-sleeved vs short sleeved, then by size. Color doesn’t matter.

The sorting takes time and sounds crazy, but here’s where it gets clever.

You photograph everything in each sorted pile, which goes quickly because your photography area is set up for that particular category. List the first item. Then use sell similar. So, back to our women’s Chico’s tops – first item listed is Chico Long-Sleeve Button Up Blouse Red Size 14. About 10-15 minutes to create the listing. The sell similar item would change Red to Blue and size 14 to 12, update condition and measurements, new photos. Less than 5 minutes. All the other information stays exactly the same: brand, category, store category, selling price, shipping.

For unusual and decor items, I’m sorting by category (music/movies/kitchen/art/decor/candles) and then by the background color I would use for photographs, as the set up for photos is time consuming.

I did a micro-sort last week and was stunned by how quickly it went. I’ve been scavenging for large boxes (Very Large Boxes) and am sorting like a madman! Trying to list during the day and sort death piles into their categories by night.

Ooooh, look! There’s a light at the end of the tunnel!

Thanks Christine. It does feel good!

Also… my death piles are bigger than I thought. I’m clearing by room and am astounded at how much I actually have. When it’s scattered around different rooms and buildings, it’s easier to underestimate it all!

So how’s everyone doing? I fell off the wagon for awhile. Hit a bunch of auctions, took a trip, got sick, blah blah blah. Then we did spring cleaning, and rounded up a bunch of our own stuff to sell. I’m back at listing death piles, and I’m down to the really tedious stuff that I’ve been avoiding.

I read a little of that KonMari book, and took a hard look at my death piles. I re-donated a bunch of things, which took care of one box of stuff. I got rid of all the clothes, except for 3 things. Pulled some pinch-pleat drapes out of one box, and discovered they had a mark on the bottom, so they are getting the axe. Pulled out a nice Gap duffle bag, and broke the zipper. :/ Bummer, but one less thing in the death pile!

There is an auction on Saturday, so I’m trying hard to get as much photographed as possible before then. Once I get the death piles conquered, I am going to look over my stagnant listings.

I spent a couple weeks organizing all my organizable (is so a word!) stuff into large, labelled boxes scavenged from the Home Depot. The boxes are huge – and full! Clothes sorted by type, bags, hats, linens, all sorted. It really helped me to see how much I actually have. When it’s scattered in different places, it’s easy to underestimate how much you’ve got.

Then I started listing the stuff that’s not so easy to organize, mostly the odds like home decor or automotive. It’s been fun seeing the shelves clear of piles of “stuff” and convert to tote bins of “listed items.” Very encouraging!

But my Death Piles have been growing due to my community donations. Spring is nearly over, so it’s likely to slow down soon. Once I’ve cleared the shelves, I am going to attack those boxes and set myself a challenge to do the lot by this year! I thought I’d post photos of progress, just to make it easier to track. My hubs is going to throw a party when I’m done! LOL

ROFL, carbs! I like that! 😀

It made me chuckle to think this is the only thread where a “race to the bottom” is actually a GOOD thing!

I dropped off of listing for a bit while we were getting moved in and we were getting ready for my husband’s extended overseas work assignment. I kept buying and now have piles all over. My dad built me some nice shelves and I have plenty of empty bins that fit perfectly into the shelves. I started listing more frequently at the beginning of June and have started to make some headway on the piles. I am still looking at the thrift stores, but I will only pick up shoes or jackets that will have a higher return. With the husband away for now, I get a few hours at night once the kiddo is in bed to focus on listing. I try to get a good amount of photos done on the weekend when I have good sunlight. I’m just taking things one storage bin at a time and will get through it one listing at a time.

Finally got my shelves sorted out and cleared a lot of the home decor items that couldn’t be “categorized” into a box. This week I have a Student Showcase coming up with my belly dance classes, so a lot of my time will be put into the event, but I’m ready to start tackling my Death Piles. It has been torture seeing all the garage sales and clearouts in my neighborhood, but I’ve been good and not attended any. Also, as expected, the community donations have slowed down to a trickle.

I see lots of Death Pile reduction in my crustal ball! 😉

I’m jumping into this late, but I’m on board. I’ve gone out the past couple of weekends and every time I’ve seen an item to possibly pick up, I got a sickly feeling while thinking about all the stuff I haven’t yet listed, then I put the item back. I like to live pretty minimally, so it’s bugging me to have piles of things all over the house. I’m coming off recovering from a shoulder surgery, so I can finally start lifting stuff again (hooray!), which will help in the whole “organization” game.

While I don’t see myself going 100% cold turkey off of garage sales and thrift stores, some subconscious thing is pushing me to list and organize before amassing too much more stuff. The food/dieting analogy is great.

Then again, my neighborhood is having a city-wide garage sale this coming weekend…

Great to read about others fighting the Perpetual Death Pile Plague like me! I was starting to wonder about my sanity, lol. An ebayer since 1999, put my own piles on hold for a 10 year period while I worked for an ebay consignment store – now that was fighting the pile on a full-time basis! Problem now is I can’t resist the thrifts, I know too much about just about everything. Will keep checking back in for inspiration!!

I’m forcing myself to slow down on purchasing right now. I have LOTS of stuff at home that’s unlisted, and it’s sounding like we’re going to be moving in the next few months, so I don’t want to have to differentiate between listed and non-listed inventory during the move.

Trying to push through closets, boxes, and shelves of unlisted stuff, knocking out a few each day. I’m guessing I’ve got enough backlog for 200-400 listings, not counting hats (I’ve got a few hundred unlisted hats waiting to see their day).

My death piles have death piles.

About two weeks ago I bought an additional 250+ vintage books very cheaply at the auction… The problem is that about half of them are in German.. Talk about death piles. I’ve begun to purge the non-sellers, but it’s a project and a half.

I have eight or nine early Thomas Mann books in German and 4 signed Oskar Maria Graf books in German that I can find no comps for. I’ve been to the Ebay.DE site and it is difficult at best to navigate as I do not know the German language.

If anyone knows of a way to make the German Ebay Page English, I would be grateful.

Thanks

I’m back on the wagon. No more buying until I hit 1000 listings. I’ve also put my whole store on 25% off sale to spur sales, so that is a very lofty goal.

So far it is working on the sales front. I also crossed the 800 listing barrier last night.

I’m overwhelmed with unlisted inventory, but I also want to curb inventory spending to maximize my cash reserves over the next month or two. Vacation is coming up and I also want to buy a work truck.

Woot woot!

http://imgur.com/URwUAa7

First box from the Death Piles emptied! It measured almost 30″ square, so it was a big one. Not the biggest, but … yay!!!

*Snoopy Happy Dance!*

Wow. She takes two minutes to photograph? I wish I could do that. She says 30 items per hour to photograph and 12 per hour to list. If I could do that, my store would