Making Space...

Another week, another haul!   It was kind of a disjointed purging this week, and I missed taking pictures of a few things before their leaving, but it was a good week of getting rid of!
I started in the game closet and I realized the situation in there is complicated.  I store blankets on a high top shelf, but I had allowed some blankets and afghans to stack up in front of the large shelves the games were on.  I had completely lost track of what I even had in terms of blankets.

So first I sorted through all the blankets and decided to rehome an old chenille bedspread and a crocheted afghan.  And then everything else was either deemed completely practical or too sentimental to donate.   We have a number of hand-quilted blankets that I'd never dream of just getting rid of.  If I can find someone in the family someday who wants them, I will gladly pass them along, but I consider these keepers (for now, at least).  I just have to figure out how to store or use them better.

Then in looking at the games I remembered we had culled through them all a couple of years ago and our sons took a fair number of them.  We still have more than we probably want to hang onto, but I found myself struggling to figure out what to get rid of.  So I came up with an idea!

I am going to encourage hubs and I to play these games - maybe a couple of nights a week, make a date to sit down after supper (or we could do it in the afternoon, for that matter!)  and play a game.  We ought to be able to whittle down some of our inventory of games that way, and we might have some fun.  Of course, it if proves to not be fun, the idea will be a bust, but I think we're going to try it out.   

I did come up with a few things in that closet that were easy to purge:

When our boys were little, they had hours of fun with these, and I hung onto them for a while thinking future grandchildren might enjoy them, too, but I finally decided to let them go.  We've donated things like vintage fixtures in the past to a local salvage store, but we recently came to learn they take much more.  I'm happy to say they took my cookbooks and these old tape players.  This particular salvage store uses the money from selling items to apply toward restoration of some historic buildings in our little town - like our very vintage movie theater downtown.  It's easy to let things go when our cast-offs can go toward something we can feel good about.

I also found a mesh bag of old pool toys, a Connect Four game we're not likely to use again, and some Brain Quest cards we're not using.

On to other things - making a dent in my old Taste of Home (and other cooking) magazines, these 27 will soon be outta here.

As hubs has been scanning slides and pictures, these photo albums have become empty and in need of a new home:

We are concluding that any pictures worth keeping (which is relatively few compared to all the photo albums that contained them) can be more efficiently stored in photo boxes - after being digitally scanned.  We're making back-ups!  The pictures are automatically scanned onto a smart card, then downloaded to the computer and an external hard drive. Some would put them into cloud storage, and that may happen in the future, but that's for another day if we do that.  

There may come a day when someone wants to put photos back into some sort of album or scrap book, but these (that we're getting rid of) are not the best things to use. We have found in the ones we have that the plastic grows brittle, and the books themselves are just really inconvenient to store - says she who still has a long, and very high, closet shelf full of photo albums, and they are a pain to get down to look through.

FWIW, I did pull out a few of the photo albums to possibly save recipe cards in.  We'll see how that goes and I may report on that in some future post.  Or maybe you'll see those binders show up in another decluttering haul.

And then 19 random books and a DVD got pulled off the shelves and will soon be headed out the door.  I'm getting bolder and braver about deciding to get rid of books.  It's a process.  

One thing that helped me this week was to make a decision to not hang onto books that I only got part way through before laying them aside.  If I haven't picked a book like that up in over a year, chances are there is no way I can start where I left off.  And there's no way I want to start all over reading a book I didn't stick with the first time.  So I'm stopping that silliness and just moving those partially read books along and out the door when I come across them.  

Then with some of the above books, when I read the description they didn't seem to appeal to me anymore.  And to be completely honest... yes, I do sometimes judge a book by its cover.  If I'm not drawn to the book because its cover is unappealing, and its description doesn't compel me to read it, why am I hanging onto it?

I don't have pictures of everything purged this week, but I did keep track on paper and I know this week saw at least 71 things either gone, or on their way out!

Making Space Week 41:  495 things gone!