New Hobby

Grant and I both came into our marriage with extensive DVD collections and I finally officially combined both of our collections and organized them. Grant alphabetized his movies, I was more keen on sorting them by genre. It meant a great deal to him, so I just alphabetized mine right in. I had already kept a running list of all of my movies on a word file, so I added his in while I was at it. Then the program automatically alphabetized the list, so my work was easy. I'm pretty dang proud of the results, even if it's not how I would have chosen to do it. After updating the catalog I discovered that Grant and I own 316 movies altogether. And to settle a long debate of who brought more, not even counting the ones that both of us had 164 came with me into the family. Not that it was a competition, but I just knew I did, so it was very satisfying to have documented proof.

We also came with overlapping tastes in movies, which has provided for much harmony in our union and we've made the most out of a Netflix membership. But I was mooching the beauty of his Netflix membership for quite some time before he got around to marrying me. :) When we combined our movie collections, we found we had 31 duplicate movies.

Seth was a sport and took quite a few of them off of our hands, but last week I listed the rest on half.com. When I made the switch from VHS to DVD, I used half.com to sell off the movies I replaced in digital format, so I have an established and perfect rating as a seller and it makes me the natural candidate to handle it. And Grant works, so I'm at home and have the time to prepare things to ship and get them to the post office.

It's such a little thrill to get an email with the subject, "You've made a sale!" And it's also nice to clear out stuff just taking up space anyway. I listed our movies the middle of last week and there's only a few left, which is awesome. But, that's because I have a strategy as a seller. When I list an item, I look it up before I list my price and I list the lowest price for the condition I'm selling it in. If I were more concerned about the amount of profit, I might not play this strategy but I don't really care about that. Right now, it's just collecting dust and even if I don't make as much as I paid for it originally, I'll still have more than I did when it was just collecting dust. So I make mine the cheapest and move my inventory really quickly. We also lucked out and only found that one of our movies had hit absolutely rock bottom price (which on half.com is $0.75) with an excessive number of other people already selling it. And it made a fun Happy Unbirthday gift for someone who'd never seen it. :)

So, in a matter of less than a week we made nearly $100**, AND cleared out almost ALL of our extra DVDs. Not bad, eh?

It's a bit addictive to sell things, and so much fun to realize you're making money that we started considering what else we could hawk off. Actually, we literally got up and running around the apartment looking for stuff. Then Grant realized he had quite a few expensive, and in many cases unused, textbooks collecting dust around here. We looked up a few and realized they were worth quite a bit, so he cleared his bookshelves as well and I added them to our inventory. It's not all textbooks, but still. When those puppies sell, they'll bring in enough to buy our baby furniture, no problem. Pretty rad, eh?

Such a great hobby! And we highly recommend it. Make money, clear space in your house and have a bunch of fun because both of those are so nice to do. So if you want any tips on selling your stuff--you know who to ask!

**$100 might sound like a lot in a short period of time. Turns out, we both had the Indiana Jones and Star Wars Trilogies which both sold quickly. Actually...I shamelessly admit I had 2 copies of the entire original Star Wars trilogy. It's not because I'm an idiot, it's because George Lucas is a wanker. When they were released originally on DVD, he claimed that the new director's cuts was all we were ever going to be able to buy. Well, I've been a Star Wars dweeb since I was 8 years old and even though I hated all the changes he made to the films, it's still Star Wars, so I bought it. Then several years later I came back from my mission and discovered that God in all of His goodness made way for a miracle and ole George decided to re-release the movies individually with the original theatrical version masterpiece and his personal makeover projects gone horribly wrong. When I got the new ones and the boys I babysat wanted to watch them, I taught them very carefully that if they ever watch Star Wars IV, V or VI to only watch the second disc with the theatrical release. I'll be darned if I raise my children or anyone else's to endure those altered heaps of cinematic torture when that second disc has the Quality on it.