I live, write, and garden in the PNW with my husband of 27 years, disabled daughter, college-aged son, and my 84-year-old mother. We have paid off $250,000.00 worth of debt (if you include the interest) in the last fifteen years and as of 6/12/2020 are 100% DEBT FREE!!!!Well, we got a ton accomplished today with the storage unit. We took five loads to the other storage place, but we also donated 15 more garbage bags of clothes. We have two bags of linens ready to be donated. There is enough for a dump load, which if the dump is open Sunday we will take out. There are also four desk top computers and 4 ancient laptops to be recycled. We have more laptops that need to be recycled, but two of them work and just need new cords so I want to make sure I get those pulled out. There are two more 13 inch TVs to be recycled and another computer monitor. Oh, we were such pack rats!
My ultimate goal is to reduce what we have in storage by 50%. There are boxes and boxes of toys and stuffed animals. And so many books. Now there are definitely some books I want to keep, but I think we can reduce what we have by 1/2, if not 2/3. I want to keep all the Anne McCaffrey, Mercedes Lackey, Elizabeth Moon, Terry Pratchett, Piers Anthony, Little House books, Narnia, Sweet Valley High (over 100), Animorphs, and some of the best loved stand alone books, as well as the majority of the cookbooks, but there are a lot of books we just read and kept for no reason other than we'd bought it and we had trouble letting go of books.
We got rid of 2 sets of Encyclopedias that we owned before you could get them on CDs or as digital downloads. That was six boxes.
There is so much kitchen stuff. I think I used to buy every gadget there was. I've found 3 mandolin sets. So much plastic storage that isn't Tupperware. I want to keep the Tupperware, but get rid of the other plastic. I still haven't found the pasta maker, which is the one thing I want to find. Found the rotisserie, though. But I don't think we need it anymore since the Nuwave oven can do basically the same thing with less energy usage and is far easier to clean. So that can be donated.
I still haven't found our wedding album, but that actually could be in my closet. I still have two boxes in there I haven't gone through. I think I have found all the other photo albums, though. We also have a bunch of duplicate photos in two photo boxes. I got them because I was going to do scrapbooking, but then I had a second kid and lost all my free time so it got back burnered.
Ay, yi, yi, I was such a spendthrift at one time. You would never know it from the last several years, but before that, yeah. And I could kick myself because we don't need it and we have been paying to store it. We are very motivated now to get it gone, though, and stop paying so much to keep stuff we have no place for in our 1000 square feet of living space.
So Much Accomplished
January 7th, 2018 at 07:50 am
January 7th, 2018 at 01:48 pm 1515332887
January 7th, 2018 at 03:06 pm 1515337592
Very glad you're clearing out; it's such a freeing experience!
January 7th, 2018 at 05:08 pm 1515344894
January 7th, 2018 at 09:19 pm 1515359973
January 7th, 2018 at 09:25 pm 1515360318
January 8th, 2018 at 02:53 am 1515379999
When considering what to release and what to save, I hope you'll focus on the items you've missed since moving to your mom's.