Selling the House on eBay

Okay, not the house (we don't own it ;-)) but merely the furniture. But I've been thinking about this for weeks. How to get rid, in a very limited time, of the furniture you've accumulated during six years, when you are about to leave for a faraway country? There is always the solution of paying a transporter to move everything for you directly there. However, I was not very enthusiast to pay at least 2000 euros for some objects that are not that special anyway.

Usually, you ask your family, your friends, the friends of your friends and their acquaintances and eventually place an advert in a special newspaper. We've tried those solutions in the past, but it was for one or two things. But how about selling a lot of them? The problem when you live in a foreign country is that you don't have that much friends anyway, so waiting for someone to be interested in one or two objects may take some time. And the ad in the newspaper, well, we've tried it too, but with very limited success. The problem with it is that you won't probably reach enough audience.

So, we decided to try the internet! eBay to be more specific. I've already bought there once or twice, DVD's mainly, but never sold anything. So we decided to give it a try. We did an attempt at the beginning of July which went well. So we decided to sell almost everything around two weeks ago (we'll sell the rest soon). Everything was sold. Now I'm in the process of waiting for the bidders to come and get their stuff. Something that can be a little bit annoying: for 10 objects, the appointments span almost over two weeks. Which means that you have to be there almost everyday waiting for someone. Anyway, I am happy that I could sell everything, so I suppose I can manage this inconvenience ;-) Now, I'm sitting on a very uncomfortable backless plastic chair as I'm writing this, and this evening even the desk will be gone...

What is also interesting about auction, is that you can fix a minimal price, but the final price can be very cool if enough people are interested. In our case, the minimal price was not 1.00 euro but the minimal value at which we were ready to sell the objects. This is not usually the case with the solutions I mentioned previously: the objects are sold with that minimal-fixed price, unless you take the risk of selling nothing if it is too high. Anyway, the final prices were not as we expected them. For example, a small table was taken for almost its brand-new price, while a computer chair was taken for almost nothing (well, the minimal price actually). I suppose this also depends on the period. I'm sure I could have had better prices if I sold in September. But that would have been too late for me...

What is also interesting about eBay is that you can find something as special as this Sinclair Spectrum ZX+. This was the first computer I've ever had, twelve years ago, on which I learnt to program in BASIC. Maybe I'll buy one someday ;-)