The Great Purge

I won’t go into gorey details until we’re a bit closer to goal, but long story short, I think we’ve decided to sell our house and build a new one just west of us. It’s exciting but also still really abstract for me.

What isn’t abstract, however, is the fact that whether we move or not, we need to purge. It seems no matter how much I try to avoid bringing new stuff in, stuff builds up. Toys from the kids birthdays, magazines a neighbor drops off, outgrown clothes, CDs from the 90s that probably should have been dumped YEARS AGO and on and on. We regularly take stuff to Good Will, but there are other things that get hidden away and only thought about when you delve deeper.

This past week, we’ve been delving deep.Very deep. Truthfully we started this before we made the decision to move. We took the beautiful but no longer functionally appropriate cabinet and bookshelf that Matt built for Tabby out of her room. It and the matching nightstand went to a friend of ours who will love them. We pared her stuff down and reorganized it and her room feels so much better for it.

We tackled the playroom as well, getting rid of baby toys and some oversized pieces the kids just aren’t using anymore. Some went to our neighbor’s grandkids others to our friend’s little one, now in the stage obsessed with dolls and dress-up. We worked on the  main floor closet where we keep a few DVDs and the art supplies and puzzles that don’t live in the playroom.

Wenesday night we attacked Matt’s office, going through a ridiculous amount of old PC games and CDs and magazines as well as papers and office supplies. Thursday night it was my office. Both offices have had full trashbags of crap taken out of them. Some is stuff I intended to do something with, saved for scrap-booking and never got around to actually doing it, other stuff should have been dealt with years ago.

This weekend we took somewhat of a break to work on other things, namely sorting the housing situation out and of course, having some fun with family and friends and the inevitable laundry and grocery shopping. But this week we will be hitting it hard again, tackling our master closets and bathroom, the laundry closet and the garage. Eek.

I do truly enjoy the catharsis of getting rid of junk. I love organizing things better and, assuming everything goes forward, it totally whets my appetite for making the new house as functional as possible. I’ve been making a list of all the things in our house that don’t really have a place: the few paper shopping bags we like to keep around, the recycle bins, the mounds of produce we buy each week, magazines, kids luggage, etc. so that I can make sure it does have a place in the new house.

It’s all a bit overwhelming right now, so I’m eating the organizing and purging part of the elephant for now.