Sorry, no pictures today - one of the kids ran off with the USB cable for my camera!
But I have been busy this week… the house looks like a tornado hit it. Been doing a lot of tackles. Today’s tackle was to go over to my parent’s house and finish filling up Dad’s trailer with our stuff that we’re keeping or need to go through - I’ll explain more in a minute. Another tackle was to completely clean out the Jeep and vacuum it. I’m happy to report that both tackles got done!
Other tackles this past week have been:
- Cleaning out the 6-foot deep freezer that we’ve been storing JUNK in and getting it ready to store (gasp!) FOOD. — DONE!
- Finding something at the thrift store to hold all of our various hats, gloves, mittens, scarves etc. in and thereby straightening up the top shelf of our coat closet. — DONE!
- Pulling out all of the hundred or so shoes from the bottom of the coat closet, sizing them, getting rid of what’s too small or worn-out for Alex and finding a way to store the hand-me-downs he’s yet to wear and the shoes that we all wear regularly. — Still in progress
- Figure out an allowance system for the boys. — DONE! Thanks to the book America’s Cheapest Family (now I have to devise our own points system and work the kinks out, but at least I have found an allowance system for the boys that rewards them *more* when they *do* more.
- Get all of the library books and videos together and back on time — DONE!
- Finish reading America’s Cheapest Family — DONE!
- Finish reading Parenting with Love and Logic — DONE!
- Organize our rapidly growing collection of board games — DONE! I put the pieces into labelled zip-lock bags, punched holes in the instructions and put them all into a 3-ring binder, then threw the boards, bags, and binder into drawers in our library. Turned over 3 feet of stacked-up board game boxes into two slim drawers out of sight. Woohoo!
More than that as well, like I said it’s been crazy here, but I’ve gotten a lot done. You couldn’t tell at the moment though.
We’ve moved around a lot since coming here in 2000. Each time we’ve moved, we’ve put more and more stuff into my parent’s workshop to “hold” until we had room for it, or time to get it out and bring it over. Well, this weekend I decided it was time for that stuff to come over here, for a number of different reasons. One, it was selfish of us to hog up space in the workshop and workshop attic when we’ve got our own house to put stuff in. Regardless of whether we *think* we’ve got room over here for it or not, it was exploiting Mom and Dad’s generosity and room they could use for their own things. We were putting our burden on them. Two, having it out of sight like it was was actually hurting us, since it’s really more STUFF we’ve got that is weighing us down but we don’t even think of it and don’t have to deal with it… so we don’t count it when looking around at our stuff here. Leaving us to think we’ve got more space here than we really do. We’ve got space, but it’s like lying to ourselves and pushing shit under the bed. Can’t really explain that one. Three, by having the stuff at Mom and Dad’s, we weren’t dealing with it. There was a ton of shit there that we haven’t used in years and obviously don’t need but we’re still hanging on to. Getting it out would be good for us. Four, whenever we *did* need something that was stored away there, it was a pain in the ass to get to it and actually use it; so much so that we often just said “screw it” and dropped the idea because we didn’t want to deal with the hassle.
So I went over there this weekend and pulled it ALL out. Wow.
I didn’t realize how much there was. There was even a washing machine! Two big motorcycle trailer’s worth. I’m happy to report that only one motorcycle trailer’s worth is coming here to the house, and much of that will be leaving once we get a chance to go through it. A lot of the stuff was in boxes that had a lot of mixed things in them, so the boxes need to have in-depth picking-through done to them. We’ll bring it over here and do the picking-through on our own turf, which will further help us to eliminate stuff. “I’d kinda like to keep this, but honestly (looking around as saying this to self), where the heck would I put it? Toss it.”
The other gargantuan pile of stuff that we’re getting rid of is currently sitting in Dad’s backyard. I’m torn; part of me would like to just haul it off to a donation center (or have someone come pick it up), while the other part of me wants to have a yard sale with it and what’s currently on our front porch in the growing “to go” pile. (Sounds trashy-looking, eh?) I bet I could make a nice chunk of change from this stuff, enough to put in new laminate on our super-cheesy ungodly-ugly countertops in the kitchen. Then again, I don’t want to go through the hassle of pricing everything and having the yard sale. Plus I’m nowhere near finished adding to the “to-go” piles, and I really don’t have anywhere that I could safely store this stuff indefinitely without putting it back into the workshop. (”Safely” here not being from threat of theft, but actually from threat of hubby reclaiming things from the pile because he couldn’t resist the temptation for that long. LOL.)
The rest of this week I’ll be going through boxes from the workshop (we did bring a few home already, Dad will probably bring the trailer over here sometime this week as well). Actually I’ll probably be doing that in bits and pieces for the next few weeks. Still tons of stuff to do in the house in the decluttering department *without* throwing this stuff in on top of it… but like I keep telling myself, it’s a work in progress. Any progress is still PROGRESS. 
What do you think? I wanna know! Please leave a comment :)
All comments get link love here... I got rid of nofollow!
again. Today it’s supposed to be in the high 60’s, and by Thursday we’re aiming for the low 40’s. I’m ready for spring, dammit!
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