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We've started the sorting/discarding/organizing process which will one day lead to packing. Yesterday Michael took a first load of stuff to Goodwill: five big bags of old clothes and toys, and a chair. We've also gotten rid of three 30-gallon bags' worth of trash. It's a good start... but it's also just a tiny dent in our three-story house full of stuff.
We're not precisely pack rats. We don't have emotional attachments to most of these things, or vague ideas that someday they'll turn out to be useful. It's more a problem of inertia. Things come into the house and get stowed away, and when they've outlived their usefulness we just never get around to throwing them out. We probably have more storage space than is really good for us.
I filled a 30-gallon trash bag just with things that were in my desk, on my desk, or stacked behind my desk in the little space between my chair and the wall. The black cardboard folder I used when I was planning our wedding, with rough drafts of the guest list, extra invitations, and sample menus from the restaurant where we held the reception. Cartoons one of my old housemates drew of my ex. The Lesbian Avengers handbook. Every single card we received when Alex was born. A highlighted guide to the competitive races in the 2006 election. A list of books I read in March of last year. Old Mac-formatted backup disks with my college senior thesis on them. Back issues of Mouth magazine. Printed-out drafts of academic papers. Posters I once presented at conferences. Manuals for electronics I no longer own. A 56k modem card which, if I recall correctly, doesn't even work, and which belonged to a laptop I got rid of in, um, 2002?
It's kind of exhiliarating to get this stuff cleared away. And it feels so good to imagine moving only needed, useful, appreciated things into our new house. The new house will have vast quantities of storage - there's a full basement - but we will not just move our junk.
Keeping the new house decluttered is going to be a different story, though. Anyone have good decluttering or clutter-prevention resources to recommend? Anything that's actually, you know, follow-able?
We're not precisely pack rats. We don't have emotional attachments to most of these things, or vague ideas that someday they'll turn out to be useful. It's more a problem of inertia. Things come into the house and get stowed away, and when they've outlived their usefulness we just never get around to throwing them out. We probably have more storage space than is really good for us.
I filled a 30-gallon trash bag just with things that were in my desk, on my desk, or stacked behind my desk in the little space between my chair and the wall. The black cardboard folder I used when I was planning our wedding, with rough drafts of the guest list, extra invitations, and sample menus from the restaurant where we held the reception. Cartoons one of my old housemates drew of my ex. The Lesbian Avengers handbook. Every single card we received when Alex was born. A highlighted guide to the competitive races in the 2006 election. A list of books I read in March of last year. Old Mac-formatted backup disks with my college senior thesis on them. Back issues of Mouth magazine. Printed-out drafts of academic papers. Posters I once presented at conferences. Manuals for electronics I no longer own. A 56k modem card which, if I recall correctly, doesn't even work, and which belonged to a laptop I got rid of in, um, 2002?
It's kind of exhiliarating to get this stuff cleared away. And it feels so good to imagine moving only needed, useful, appreciated things into our new house. The new house will have vast quantities of storage - there's a full basement - but we will not just move our junk.
Keeping the new house decluttered is going to be a different story, though. Anyone have good decluttering or clutter-prevention resources to recommend? Anything that's actually, you know, follow-able?
