Monday 25 March 2013

Getting rid of stuff! - How we did the unthinkable

We have a lot of STUFF. I bet some of you can relate to that. When we moved in two years ago we piled up all our boxes in the basement and forgot about them. Since then we have only been adding to the pile and not sorting through anything. It got to the point where we couldn't even walk into our basement, never mind find something we were looking for. Here is the poor state of our basement.


As a basement clean up is not fun, we needed some inspiration to get started and a solid deadline by which to finish. We scheduled a family gathering for Easter, that includes Easter egg painting in the basement. This way we knew the basement had to be cleaned on time. We also made a plan to get rid of anything we hadn't used in the past year. We tried to keep to the " if we don't use it we lose it" idea. 

We started out slow and steady and as the boxes got emptied a little pathway appeared. Seeing the path we knew we were making progress.


 We opened up boxes, revisited memories and made decisions about what to keep and what to let go.


Some of it felt good to let go; some of it was a challenge. Things reminding us of family traditions were a tough decision.


Cinnamon kept a close eye on our progress.


We spent about 8 hours sorting, moving boxes, arguing what to keep or not to keep, laughing and rescuing the kittens from falling off things. Doing it while there was snow on the ground made us feel better; we weren't missing out on sunny garden days.

After a few weekends working on this project, we finally finished.  The basement got emptied, swept...


...and we reduced the number of our boxes to about one third. Yay!


It felt good getting rid of stuff. It makes you feel lighter. It also makes our small house more livable and feel more spatious. We will be holding a garage sale in the spring to sell some of the stuff and donate the rest.  If you need some inspiration to get started, here again is the before and after:



BEFORE the clean-up
AFTER the clean-up

Have a good "getting rid of stuff" day!

Mia





1 comment:

  1. That looks familiar. Congratulations, you're invited over after Easter !!

    ReplyDelete