My goal for something to do every day is to list 5 things for sale on eBay. Need to get rid of stuff before we move. Should have been doing this all along, but better late than never I guess.
Moving is a pain in the neck that way. I began to see the wisdom in some city friends' insistence on moving apartments every five or six years just to force themselves to declutter. I was in a rent-controlled place with a doorman, so no way in hell was I going to follow their path. However --and therefore-- it was hell getting ready to give up my pied-a-terre in NYC after 20 years of living in the city full time and 10 more splitting the time between there and the house I had bought up here.
I resorted to cutting deals with the porter, who over the years had proven very trustworthy. So I just put a bedsheet in the corner of the living room and put things on it that he could take and sell if he wanted, else just remove them from my place and discard them. Once a week or so, when I was down in the laundry facility, I'd stop by his rooms and leave a note that I had another "selection" ready at the home-brew bazaar. He'd get the key from the super or stop by on the weekend and spend half a day clearing out the latest take.
When in my view most of what I had set on that bedsheet was pretty much worthless, I'd also leave him a cash tip for his troubles. But some of what I was ditching was entirely marketable, e.g. small appliances that I had got tired of lugging back and forth to the boondocks and so had bought duplicates for upstate. When I left for good I stopped by and gave him a parting cash gift for all the help he was during that time and on the day the movers I'd hired from up here came downstate for the piano, furniture and bins of stuff I was keeping.
I have to laugh at myself now though. I was focused on getting rid of things and packing what I wanted to keep. Nowadays I see stuff on eBay like "vintage" (1980s) Bloomingdale's shopping bags (back then they had all these designer ones) going for totally outrageous prices. Hah. When I was getting ready to move I used Bloomingdale's shopping bags from the 1960s (!) just like trashbags, i.e., to encase airport-terminal paperbacks and old New Yorkers that were destined to land on that bedsheet for the porter to deal with... and I'm pretty sure he too was inclined to pitch stuff like that into the recycle rather than trudge up to the used booksellers near Columbia University.
Between the two of us we probably threw out thousands of dollars' worth of resalable stuff we both figured wasn't worth the hassle to sell, and there were better things to do with the time in any given day.
So yeah, timing is everything. Time itself is everything! It's very hard to make time to declutter for profit because it's basically a big pain in the neck to sell stuff at yard sales or online... unless you really get into it. I could never quite get there and as far as I know, my porter wasn't a connoisseur of resale and flea markets in the city either. A few boxes of books he did take up to the resellers. He mostly sold the little appliances to friends and kin and may have kept a few to replace his own equivalents. I haven't missed a single thing I parted with from those days and in fact wished I'd left even more behind since had to ditch them from here!