What a start to the year. My feet have never been this creamed, my peanut butter never this lavishly slathered and my vegetables never roasted on such copious amounts of snowy-white baking paper. You are reading about the storage cupboard contents bonanza of a person that is soon to move from London to Spain. Everything needs to go. If the impending move has had me throw my kitchen supply frugality over board, it is nothing in comparison to the moral depravity that has been provoked in me by spending too much time in what I can only describe as the 21st century manifestation of hell – Facebook marketplace – the platform where I have been trying to sell my used furniture for the better part of the month…
06 January
The day the Three Wise Men supposedly bore gold, myrrh and frankincense to Baby Jesus felt like an appropriate moment to bestow an equally generous, if not more so as more practical, gift on anyone living in driving distance of London N8 – my Ikea furniture. Kept in a smoke-free, pet-free, child-free, cleaning-products-obsessed-boyfriend home, they were in mint condition. Confidently, I uploaded my goods with prices just below their original purchasing value, given that Ikea prices had sky-rocketed since I bought them three years ago.
- Projected gains: £1,000
09 January
I narrowly escaped a scam. As a Facebook marketplace ingénue, I didn’t think to question when someone messaged me shortly after I uploaded my items, offering to purchase a bunch of my most expensive things without asking further details about any of them. Even better, instead of entering into a long price negotiation, they offered to pay me via PayPal before collecting the furniture. Bingo! Luckily, I’m not only an ingénue but a Luddite with no PayPal account. The hassle of setting one up created enough of a deal delay for me to look past my impatience to be rid of things and notice the red flags.
- Gains: £20 from selling our ratty office chair to a real person
- Losses: None, luckily. By a mouse click.
11 January
A barrage of ‘Is this still available’-messages followed by deafening silence had me cowering in a foetal position next to my half-disassembled furniture less than a week into my sales game. Some opposition research revealed: my treasured kitchen table was available on Facebook Marketplace 3 more times, my cosy reading chair 4 times and my laptop stand 2 times. When Ikea meets metropolis. I began to drastically lower my prices.
- Gains: A big, fat serving of humble pie.
- Losses: Hours spent stuck in inane conversations about the exact measurements of chairs, mirrors and picture frames, all of which were SPECIFICED IN THE AD!
15 January
Multiple people agreed to collect items, then cancelled last minute. With two weeks left until our move-out date, I descended into panic. What if instead of getting rich, I’d end up paying Haringey Council to collect the furniture I was unable to sell? I started accepting offers on my items left, right and centre. Did I agree to meet a 4-months-pregnant (why do I know this?!) lady with my reading chair in a station on the northern line when her other babies are at the nursery? Maybe, but tough luck. Someone non-impregnated offered to collect from my home. Said I would accept your offer on a mirror? Well, someone else was willing to pay my asking price. You’d already organised a Zipcar to collect next weekend? Cry me a river, someone else offered same-day collection. I am called rude over going back on a £10 rug deal.
- Gains: £230
- Losses: My integrity.
19 January
My first trip to the tip with items I can’t sell or donate. My 10-year-old laptop, which at one point in time I couldn’t live without sailed into a black container, crashing into the peeling milk frother without which I wasn’t able to start my day at a different point in my life.
- Gains: The heap of things I have to deal with is getting smaller.
- Losses: Thinking I know the value of anything.
22 January
With the to-sell pile growing smaller, my attention turned to the things I couldn’t bring myself to get rid of and therefore needed to transport to Spain. Fridge magnets charged with memories of the places we’ve seen. Birthday cards whose well-wishes surely would turn into curses if I throwed them away. Diaries heavy with the stories I had been telling myself about who I had become. While completing the shipping customs forms, I caught myself thinking that I wouldn’t mind one or two boxes getting lost in the ongoing post-Brexit customs parcel kerfuffle, relieving me from having to choose what items to carry to the grave.
- Gains: Memories?
- Losses: £60 sending fees and the superhuman patience required to complete customs forms.
23 January
Taking a break from the moving madness, I accompanied a friend to a 5 Rhythms dance event. For 2 hours I stretched, expanded, contracted, bounced, rolled, swung and turned with all kinds of people barefoot in a North London Church across heated wooden floors and in front of a macramé-d altar .
- Gains:
- The energy to revisit those moving boxes and my Facebook Marketplace apologies.
- The realisation that at the end of the day, I need very little to feel heart-racingly, blood-pumping ly, Cheshire-cat-grinningly alive.
