Sunday, November 29, 2009

Unclutterer: Down and Dirty

Before: Let the Uncluttering Begin

After being anxious to jump into the project for about a month, and then getting Mike psyched up for the task as well, we decided to jump right into the uncluttering this morning. Mike had brought back the last load of his boxes for his parents' house the night before, so everything was brought into the center of the basement (from the car, from the coal bin storage area, from under the guest room bed and from the depths of the guest room closet). Because you're not actually standing in the space, it might not seem like that much stuff…but it was.

Boxes and boxes of stuff.

Unused wedding gifts. First grade report cards. Soccer trophies. Old printers. Zip disks. Artwork. Boy Scout leather work. You name it, it is probably there.

Arming ourselves with garbage bags, water and a label maker ($40 model obtained for $10, thank you Black Friday!), we started, pulling box after box onto the table and pulling everything out. Being my first foray into uncluttering, we weren't super diligent - we each have a box of things to keep and/or scan before tossing and we're maybe only halfway done with the pile of boxes - but we're making progress.

We have piles of things to donate, one of things to sell, but then the real show of progress is the garbage and recycle piles. I'm happy to report, though extremely messy therefore making it look like we degressed instead of progressed, the recycle pile is huge and over flowing. And it's not taking us as long as I had thought it would to go through things.

It will still take awhile to get through everything. To purge, then organize, but I'm confident we won't be at this for months, which is good because that basement gets pretty cold when the snow starts to fall. We just have to hope for no heavy rains until we get through the initial phase because as it's set up right now, everything is right in the path of the little streams that start to form once the ground is fully saturated.

2 comments:

Jen said...

Whew! Good luck getting that done!
By the way, zip disks?? You wouldn't happen to have an old zip drive you don't want in there somewhere? About ten years ago I was stupid enough to put some files on zip disks . . . and then my drive stopped working.

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