By Loretta Humble/Around the Town
I have got to make this interesting, because I really need you to read it all. I need you to understand my problems. You see I’ve got a granddaughter who is trying to get to Ireland. No, I take that back. I now have two granddaughters who are trying to get to Ireland. This is the trip Taegan Allen’s Honors class has organized. Her sister Laken was excited about helping Taegan plan for her trip, but got even more excited when she found out she could go too for nearly the same price as Taegan. Then they found a way they could spend 13 more days for very little more money and get to see a whole lot more, staying with friends. This is a very big deal for them. And I don’t mind helping out with the expense, but I don’t want to go bankrupt getting them there.
I need to keep your interest a little bit longer until I can explain what I am up to here. Okay. How about this … I’m going to tell you a secret that haunts the entire Humble family. It is this: We don’t get rid of stuff. We just store it. We are candidates for a TV show. Some would say we are appropriate for American Pickers. Others might suggest Hoarders.
It has been easy for us to hang on to all our stuff because we have had so much room to put it. We Humbles have owned and operated Cedar Lake Nursing Home for over fifty years and twenty-something years ago when we built a new building we kept the old one too.
Can you imagine the potential for storage in a then-vacant 60-bed nursing home building? We have some important things going on there, such as our rehab operation, and business offices. But that leaves a whole world of room to store stuff. Then we bought that metal building next to First State Bank 10 or 12 years ago and proceeded to fill it up with some nursing home stuff but mostly different family member’s stuff that had overrun their homes. Last year I found a bargain on a bunch of beautiful old clocks and mirrors and dressers and pretty stuff like that and claimed a whole room there which I filled to the brim. I thought I’d get a booth in one of the antique stores, but a year has passed now, and it is still sitting there.
My daughter Liz and I love to find unique things to decorate the nursing home with. So when we have found beautiful things at bargain prices we have grabbed them up. Then sometimes we didn’t find the right place to use them, so we stored them. We figured we would find the right place someday. Liz particularly has resisted purging these rooms of their treasures. But now she has two daughters who really do want to go to Ireland, and she has become purger-in-chief. And like me, she has begun to see how wonderful it will be to rid ourselves of all this “stuff” that somebody else will love. And we aren’t stopping with our own stuff. Everybody who has stashed stuff here had better look out, or it is going to be turned into Taegan’s and Laken’s trip to Ireland.
So Thursday morning at 9:00 am we start our first Big Sale. Kristi Huls has generously allowed us to use her storefront right next door to Mister Sweet Tooth, in the Magardo Building on Mitchum Street in Malakoff. We have a lot of good looking stuff. We have some nice art, middle-aged furniture, lots of good decorative items, a massage table, a scooter, outdoor furniture toys, tables and chairs and all the usual stuff. We even have some antique furniture here, and while many people prefer shopping for antiques for sale online, you never know, there could a bargain here with your name on it. No tools or appliances on this round and I think I may take my salad spinner back home. I really should use it. I’ll bring something to replace it. Every sale gets those girls a little closer to Ireland. And our hearts a little lighter as we free ourselves from owning stuff we don’t need.
There are going to be at least three, maybe four more sales. This is a small building and will only hold so much. This majority of the items in this sale are from the east wing of the old nursing home. We still have the south wing to go. And after that the metal building by First State Bank, and then Liz’s house, and then maybe Tina and Randy Norwood’s barn. They are thinking about it, but haven’t totally committed to that yet.
I hope you will come. If for no other reason than to laugh at how we have accumulated stuff, and to encourage us in our un-stuffing effort. Of course, I hope you will buy something. We’ve got to sell a lot of stuff to get these two girls to Ireland.
If you come the first day you will see how beautifully everything is set up, just like a regular shop. This is all thanks to my friend Shelly Fugitt, my friend and neighbor. She has worked for days helping us make sense of all this stuff. She does this for a living but these sales are a gift to our girls. Please remember her if you decide to unclutter. I’ll bet there are a bunch of you out there who could do like us and trade a bunch of clutter for something really valuable.
