About 2 ½ years ago, following a horse riding accident that required a lengthy stay in the hospital and several surgeries, my husband and I decided that life was too short to be stressed all the time trying to live the affluent lifestyle. The time in the hospital gave us the opportunity to slow down for awhile and take the time to think about what was important and what was not. As it turned out, most of what we had and worked so hard for, was not important at all. We were running a business that required both of us to work 12 – 16 hour days just to continue to pay for our lifestyle. On the surface, we looked like we had it all. But we weren’t happy. In fact, the more stuff we acquired, the less happy we became.

  It started with my husband. He decided one day the he was finished living a life full of stress. He had had enough and he immediately closed our successful construction business. A friend of ours said that we had been hit with a cosmic 2x4. Something was telling us to STOP what we were doing. We really didn’t have a plan on what to do; we just knew that we couldn’t do what we were doing any longer.

   We decided that the first step towards wherever we were going was to sell our property and move into a smaller, more modest house. So we put our big house up for sale and started cleaning house. It’s amazing how much stuff you can cram into a large house and a barn. We really had no idea how much stuff we had until it came time to start getting rid of it. So step one was to start having yard sales to sell the things I didn’t want or need. Things I had forgotten that I even owned. I had never had a yard sale before, so I didn’t know what to expect. Little did I know that I was about to discover my passion.

   The first yard sale was tremendously successful. People started lining up early in the morning to come to our house to see what we had. As it turns out, a lot of our customers were neighbors that just wanted to see what our house and property looked like since it couldn’t be seen very well from the road. This was OK with us since we were now trying to sell it all and needed as many people as possible to see it.

   I had more fun and met more people that the money for the items I was selling didn’t seem as important as the actual experience of “letting go” of it was. After the sale, I immediately decided to have another one the following weekend. This time I’d add a few items from my house that I kind of liked, but could live without. Once again, the sale was a huge success. I had even more fun, met even more people, and actually started paying attention to the fact that I was also making some decent money. My husband put a few choice items on Craigslist, which I had never heard of before, and actually sold them! My career path, unbeknownst to me at the time, was being forged.

   About 8 weeks into this process of cleansing, we decided to have an open house during one of our yard sales. Many folks had expressed an interest in seeing the inside of the house, but we didn’t have it quite ready to show prior to this weekend. We had several folks want to look in the house, including one of our neighbors who we had never met before. To make a long story short, she and her husband bought the property and we closed a few weeks later.

   Now I had to shift gears and start getting serious about reducing our personal inventory. We stepped up the yard sales and craigslist postings. I began to mentally let go of some of the items that I thought were important to me. Things that I just knew I couldn’t live without became expendable. The money we were getting for our stuff really began to add up and we were actually staying afloat financially. And most importantly, my husband and I were having an absolute blast selling our items and meeting some of the nicest and most interesting people.

   We found a nice little house in a neighborhood just 1 mile from our previous house. Come moving day, we thought we might have gotten rid of enough of our stuff to be able to move into our new little house. No way! We ended up stuffing that little house full, including the large double garage.  When we couldn’t stuff any more, we rented a storage unit down the street for the rest of it. It was obvious we still had a way to go in the cleansing process.

   We immediately started having garage sales as soon as we could. All of our neighbors came to meet us and most of them ended up purchasing some of our stuff. We were now meeting a completely new group of people and having even more fun. At this point an idea started to swirl around in my head. Could I actually make a living doing this? It seems that there is no end to people looking for a good bargain on quality items. And it’s a very rewarding experience to be the person that provides that bargain for them. Maybe there is a fun business here.

   Eventually I began to run out of my best stuff. I was still having garage sales on a regular basis, and selling on craigslist, but sales were beginning to slow down. I didn’t have enough of the good stuff left from my previous life in the “too big” house. I really wasn’t ready to stop though. I was having way too much fun and the extra money didn’t hurt either. I even had a group of buyers that became regular customers at my garage sales. I was really enjoying it when they came to by just to see what new items I decided to sell or just to say hi.

   A number of my friends were very interested in what I was doing. They didn’t seem to have much interest in having garage sales themselves, but they had some things they wanted to get rid of. I began consigning items in my garage sales. It was helpful to have some new items to sell, but that didn’t last very long. Most of them didn’t have enough stuff to keep my inventory high enough to attract a lot of customers to my sales. If I was really going to make a business out of this, I had to come up with more items to sell, particularly furniture.

   I began scouring other garage sales, thrift stores, auctions, and craigslist postings to see what I could find. I was amazed at how much stuff there was out there that people wanted to get rid of, cheap! I began to acquire furniture items. Many items were in good shape and ready to be resold “as-is”. In order to get the best deals I could, I would often buy furniture that had some minor repair needs. I would then have my husband repair the furniture so that I could resell it. Eventually, I was keeping him very busy repairing items that I found. We started having more and more garage sales and craigslist sales. This little business that I fell into was starting to grow some legs. The most immediate problem we faced was a lack of space. My new little business requires a lot of space for the furniture items. Many times we’d have so much ready to sell or waiting for repair that we couldn’t get into our garage at all. If we were really going to make this a real business that we could support our family with, we needed to take the next step. We decided it was time to find a space where we could spread out a little and have room to make repairs and show people our “inventory”. This space was necessary, but we weren’t making enough profit yet to afford very much. We found the perfect solution.

   During my search to find furniture bargains I stumbled upon an auction house not far from my home.  After attending several live auctions we started to make a number of friendships with the other regular auction attendees, and with the auctioneer and his wife, Jim and Bea Curtis. Jim and Bea were single handedly running this very labor and time intensive business often spending 12-16 hours a day working at it to make ends meet (sound familiar?). One fateful day, we were all sitting around talking and I began to tell Jim and Bea our story and how we got to this point in our lives. I think that I must have inspired them to start thinking about a better and more fun way to make a living. Within a few months, they decided to get out of the auction business and start doing the same thing we were doing. Jim had sold antiques in antique mall booths in the past for a hobby, so he had a little background in the resale business. He also had a warehouse space that he had rented that was being underutilized. After some discussion we decided to try this new venture together. Not as partners, but just sharing expenses so that we could start our new little businesses on a shoe string. We cleaned up the warehouse in the basement of an old office building and made it our new home away from home. We share a little over 4000 sq. ft. of space with about ½ being workshop/storage and the other being our “sales floor”. It is not fancy, but we’re real proud of it.

   So far we’ve been at this for about 6 weeks and we couldn’t be more excited about the potential of our little business. We decided to be “open” Friday and Saturday from 8 am until 6 pm and Sunday noon until 5 pm. We’re still trying to keep operating expenses to a minimum as we’re not making enough profit to afford some of luxuries that the retail antique malls or resale stores can offer. We’ve even painted our own sale signs and post them on weekends just like all the other garage salers do. Recently the city sign police told us that we were not able to put out the signs that we made, so we’re looking for more ways to generate traffic to our warehouse/shop. So, if you feel compelled, spread the word about us please. We can’t afford to do any advertising right now, but we’re hoping word-of-mouth will be enough to get us going.

   My husband has decided to also dedicate himself to this endeavor full time. He spends his days repairing, refinishing, repainting, and creating furniture. He and Jim will often take items that were destined for the dump, combine them, and make a beautiful new, one of a kind, piece of furniture. It always amazes me to see what they come up with and how much furniture or old lumber is saved from the landfills. In our time on this planet, doing whatever we can to live a more “green” lifestyle is very important. Recycling and Reusing old furniture, lumber and other items is a great way to add something unique to your home and help our environment at the same time.

   We had to come up with a name for our business, but we had too many different ideas. We were actually several different businesses under one roof. So instead of just one name for the entire business, we’ve broken it up to be several different small businesses but operating out of what we call “The Reuse Market”. For more information you can go to a web site that my husband has been building. It’s not quite finished yet, but you’ll get the idea. It’s at http://the-reuse-market.com

   We hope to see you soon at our new little business. I promise you’ll have a great time treasure hunting through all of our wonderful estate sale items. And don’t forget to spread the word!

Kressa Peterson

678-949-2704

The Reuse Market

9465 Main St.

Woodstock, GA   30188