I'm a collector.
No, it's not porcelain dolls stacked neatly in a curio cabinet. It's not seashells placed nicely on a shelf. It's not stamps put into an organized little book.
It's junk.
Really, just lots and lots of junk. When it piles up on every horizontal surface in the house and spills out of every junk drawer I have, I start boxing it up and putting it in the basement. Then when the boxes start piling up, we buy more gorilla racks to stack them on. And when that gets to be too much, we start talking about renting a storage shed.
I've been confronting my problem lately and this blog is part of that confrontation. I need your help and ideas and encouragement. I'll tell you what I've done so far and you can help me figure out where to go from here.
First, I bought some of those cool storage boxes with the dividers in them. I've been organizing all the buttons and safety pins and screws from the junk drawer so I actually have a place to put things when I come across them instead of just throwing them into a junk drawer. I've been organizing larger things like the kids' toys into larger bins and boxes.
Second, I've been loading up bags and boxes with stuff to take to D.I. and throwing away things that are broken or no longer have all the parts.
Third, I've decided we need to have a garage sale. Somehow, the thought that we could even get back pennies on the dollar makes it seem easier to give up some of the things we have collected.
Fourth, I'm trying to get rid of some of our baby things even though I'm not positive we're done having babies yet. Some of this stuff we've had for nine years and if we were to have another baby in the future, it'd be nice to have new things anyway.
The culmination of all this work is that when we pare our stuff down enough, we'll be able to hire a company to come in and finish the basement. I can't wait for that project to get underway, so I'm right in the thick of paring down right now. It's nice to see a lot of junk go out the door and to know I'll never have to look at it and decide what to do with it again. On the other hand, it's hard to part with those things. I'm still not sure why.
Sounds like you're on the right track. The one other piece of advice I have - if you haven't opened a box in a year, throw it away. Don't open it up to see what is inside because you'll get sidetracked... Just throw it away. :)
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Thanks for the tip, Andi. Unfortunately, I don't feel like we can do that this time around because there are things in there that are known to be valuable. For instance, my mom is sure that we ended up with a box of her old '45s and we haven't come across them yet. So for her sake at least, I have to look at everything. But the older the box, the more brutal I'm going to try to be.
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