Wednesday, March 21, 2012

Purge, Purge, Purge

The fact that we're going to have three more people living here - and two cats - means that we need to get rid of all the extra stuff we have around here, otherwise there's not going to be any room for Beth and Tim and Jason and all their stuff.  It's amazing how much stuff collects when you live in the same place for 13 years! 

We have a fairly nice-sized storage room in the basement.  Jeffrey built shelves to hold everything, and we started organizing everything.  We figured if we boxed everything up, clearly labeled them, and stored them on the shelves, we could keep the stuff we wanted and always be able to find whatever we need.  The only problem is we never finished organizing, and the kids kept boxing stuff up and throwing it back there whenever they wanted to get stuff out of their rooms.  Pretty soon it was practically impossible to move around back there, let alone find anything.

So, everybody has been going through all their stuff and getting rid of all the extra stuff we don't need.  I'm mostly guilty of  holding onto magazines, waiting to have time to actually look through them before I toss them in the recycle.  I've tossed quite a few in the last couple months, but I have more.  Somebody remind me that no matter how many dealfun.com reviews I might see that offer impossible to pass up magazine discounts - I need to pass them up!  3 years of a really great magazine for 50¢?  Nope, gotta pass!  (OK, maybe they never offer quite that good a deal, but you get my point!)

The kids had stuffed animals, partially used notebooks from school, old toys, and all kinds of junk, so they both went through everything and neatly boxed up the stuff they want to keep, threw a bunch of stuff into the trash and recycle, and set aside even more stuff to donate to Goodwill.  It took several trips to get all the stuff hauled up to Goodwill, but it's out of here now.  It also took several weeks to get all the trash and recycling out.  Most of the time we put our trash out every other week because we just don't have that much trash, but for a while there we were filling the toter every week and putting out extra paper and cardboard for recycling, until we got it all out of here.

Now, if we can just keep from collecting more...