Garage sale !

Wow, what a week.  I feel like I've done nothing but prepare for... and live through... this garage sale.  I've well and truly lost count of the number of boxes I've unpacked and sorted.  Finally, it's over.  We had a great weekend of sales and are very happy with the amount of stuff we managed to move.  So now we're down to two large piles - one for a charity shop - and one to offer to an antique dealer for a song.  We'll store a handful of items that are too good to give away but it's been a fantastic result.

Two sets of neighbours have been down here at least 6 times each.  They didn't walk away empty handed once!  They've been such good customers that we've decided we'll give them a few items that they looked at and obviously wanted but having spent too much money already they left them.

We've met neighbours from further up the street that we've never met before and chatted with others that we've only met a couple of times.  Funny when we've had this house more than 11 years and now when we're preparing to sell it we get to know more of the neighbours better!  Still, we know far more of them here than we ever did in all our years of living in Melbourne.  In Melbourne we might have known the names of the people on either side and across the road, and on occasion even another couple in the street.  Here we know the names of most of the people in both streets (we live on a corner), and after this weekend there is barely a house that we don't know the name of the occupant.

We had a nice encounter with a lady who owns a house maybe 2kms past our place, on a dirt road.  It's a lovely historic stone cottage well known to everyone in town.  She mentioned that she's the descendant who owns it now (it's been in the same family since it was built in the 1860's) and Mick rushed off and found a package of paintings and drawings that we've collected over the years to "one day" have framed.  A friend from years ago had a dad who was a very good artist.  We gave him a book that had photos of our town and he chose a couple and made wonderful detailed sketches for us of each.  One of them happened to be a photo of a lady using a spinning wheel in the front garden of this stone cottage.  Mick found the sketch to show the lady and she immediately exclaimed "that's my sister!".  She knew the photo well.  We did the only thing we could - we gave her the sketch to frame and put on the wall in the cottage.  She was thrilled.  We felt good to have made someone so happy.  And, we still have the other sketch.