Even I have to agree that the extent to which I have been excited about having a yard sale for years - years! - is a little bizarre. It significantly pre-dated ownership of an actual yard in which to have said sale in; I started sequestering items away in boxes marked "YARD SALE" about ten months prior to our move to the 'burbs. Which meant both that I created a very annoying storage situation in an apartment that was already more than slightly lacking in that department...and also that I had a lot of stuff to sell when the big day officially arrived.

Why all this excitement? Some combination of the following:

1. It lets you play out the fantasy of owning a boutique (which is a fantasy that I have, although I'm aware that the reality of boutique-ownership is likely not nearly as idyllic as the picture I have in my head);

The other day we had a couple of friends over for dinner who are renting in the area and circling the idea of purchasing property, and at one point they looked around them and said, "But seriously: how do you do it? If you want to buy a house, where do you even start?"

I can totally relate to that feeling. Before we began our two-year odyssey I felt like buying a house was such a huge undertaking, so riddled with technicalities and legal issues and words like appraisals and inspections and FHA loans that sounded like a completely foreign language, that I simply wasn't the kind of person who was capable of doing it. It seemed like the kind of thing "other people do." People who know, for example, what a variance is.

Guess what? I know what a variance is now.

But in the beginning, I didn't even know what Step Number One was. Did you call...a bank? A broker? Check your credit score?