In our community we have a once-a-year second-hand toy market in June, so I spent most of last week purging the kids' toys. I got rid of every broken/incomplete toy still left in the house (after several rounds of decluttering). I found all these ugly publicity bags somewhere hidden in a closet. Why did I keep them? Both kids have special backpacks for school, gymnastics, swimming and dancing, so we reallly don't need them.
My daughter tossed away these Barbie heads (it's all about the hair) and some other Barbie stuff.
And then there were the toys I wanted to give a second life. I kept one box of Duplo (the train, for the grand-children :-)), but two other boxes were sold for 15€/box. We made somebody very happy with a large shoe box full of Playmobil for 10€. We sold several puzzles and games for 50 cent or something.
The biggest problem was the garage. I bought this for my son's birthday for 65€ (I even checked it on Amazon). They played with it for a couple months and after that it just stood there on the floor, making me angry when cleaning my son's room. I collected the pieces from all around the house and I even cleaned it.
We started with 15€ (a bargain, we thought) and at the end we went down to 5€, BUT NOBODY WANTED TO BUY IT! I told my husband I was not going to take this garage back home again, so we found a little boy who was interested and gave it to him for free (he was very happy, I'm not sure about his parents...).
We sold for about 60€, we had an ice cream and the kids can buy something they really like and play with for the rest of the money (I'll show you their favorite toys in another post).
Lessons learned:
- toys lose their value as soon as they leave the shop, and
- nothing bigger than what would fit in a shoe box is entering the kids' rooms again!
