Oh, the stuff that piles up when you have four children. My word, people, it can get ugly so fast. The papers, the artwork, the random sticks and stones and bottle caps and strings. Add to that moving into a house packed to the brim with a all of the things your husband's granddad and grandmother owned... Oy.
The Mister and I got married in 2001, months after his grandfather passed away, and we moved into his grandfather's house. Everything was there. Pots, pans, dishes, silverware, linens, furniture, all.of.the.things. On one hand, it was a huge blessing to have everything provided for us. On the other hand, it was just a lot of stuff. And on the other hand, it was very interesting to sort through all the things with my new mother-in-law.
Most of my stuff from my childhood and college years was in boxes in the garage and basement, where it stayed for YEARS because a) I had no immediate use for it, and b) there was no place to put it. Last summer I went through most of the boxes and discovered that there was next to nothing in any of the boxes that was even sort of important to me. I filled our big green garbage bin; I filled contractor bags. It was SO.CRAZY.GOOD to have it gone.
One of the first things Jen says in her chapter about memorabilia is to save only what is STILL MEANINGFUL to you, not what was meaningful to you back in the day. I pitched random tchotchkes, all the letters from former boyfriends (I had one that really embraced the idea of the love letter), programs from concerts I performed in college that I didn't remember. It felt really good to shed all those extra pounds of things I had stopped caring about.
Another idea Jennifer proposes is to organize photos into archival-quality albums. My two oldest children have well-documented albums of their first few years. I don't have albums of the last two, but I do have thousands upon thousands of digital files of photographs that are organized by month on our computer. And yes, they are backed up. Because seriously people? BACK.UP.YOUR.FILES. It's so easy I can do it all by myself, and I will not have to perform The Ugly Cry if our hard drive bites the dust.
I do have two clothing items I am saving: my high school jacket (I'm really not sure why I'm keeping it, other than that I'm just not ready to pitch it yet), and my wedding dress and veil. Right after our wedding, I had my dress cleaned and preserved, and it lives in the back of my super-small closet in an enormous box. There are some tiny baby clothes saved from when my people were tiny, and those are wrapped in tissue and stored in our non-hypo-allergenic cedar chest, away from the nasty moths.
Now. If only I could part with yarn and fabric as easily. Hrmph.
Check in to see what the other super-organizers are doing!
House of Grace
House of Grace
Doesn't it feel GREAT to ditch stuff? I recently went through a box I found in my son's closet. There were tiny hospital baby hats (4 of them - which one was which?) and cards/bday party invitations/certificates - all from the kids when they were little. I tossed it. I don't know why I saved it all in the first place. Purge purge purge! (Also did you know I kinda sorta mentioned you on my blog in a roundabout way just sayin?)
ReplyDeleteAwesome job Pam!
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