Here’s a new task to help simplify our lives and minimizing our households.
Challenge # 18: Age is just a number
How old are you? Get rid of that many items today.
How’d it go:
I needed a quick and easy ploy to get rid of a few things this week, and this challenge fit the bill. Finding 42 items to discard seemed daunting at first, but I’m a little embarrassed to admit that it wasn’t. AT ALL. There is still too much clutter in my home!
I started with an empty box and walked around the house. Finding one item led to the next and to the next and so on. I counted out loud each time I found something and either put it in the box or took it straight out to my car. I got rid of kitchen stuff I didn’t use, rusted cast iron that I am never going to refurbish, old packaged diet food (which went in the compost bin), outdated curtains and a bent curtain rod, old clothing, some brand new sheets that don’t fit any size mattress we own, a box of old papers, DVD’s, a few broken toys, and many more random items.
It took me less than an hour to get to 37, and many of those were groups of items which technically brought my purging to well over the number 42. Later, when I told my partner about the challenge and that I was stalled at 37, we happened to be standing in the garage. He looked around and easily picked several items that completed the task.
Some things were given away, some went right in the garbage and a bunch of it will to go a second-hand store. It was a good exercise, much easier than I thought and surely doable at least once a week for the foreseeable future in my overflowing house.
Kellie Knight’s “Angle Full of Grace” 
This is a good idea. Culling through stuff, for most people, has to be done in bite-sized bits. Otherwise, it’s overwhelming. It’s really not hard to work at something for, say, an hour – just set aside one hour and work at culling for sixty minutes…and then stop (two hours if you’re up to it). Plan on doing that every weekend. A person does not need to get a WHOLE house or a WHOLE garage in order in a day or a weekend. Way too overwhelming! We’re going to get rid of the carpeting in our basement (it’s the last place in the house with carpeting) and one thing that need to be done is to move books. So, over about four weeks, I went through each book to decide whether to save or donate. I think I hauled about 200 books to the library. About three weeks ago, I started going through boxes in the garage. One box at a time. I’ve found some great stuff (e.g., correspondence between my mother, then age 18, and a solider in the Pacific between 1944-1945 during WWII – one of the letters dated April 15, 1945 came back to my mother “Return to Sender” so my mom contacted the War Department and received a letter dated September 29, 1945 telling her “Sgt Carter died a heroic and noble death when he was fatally struck by mortar fire as he was helping evacuate some of his wounded men under fire” on April 30, 1945 – he was just 20 years old).
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Wow. What a treasure to get that little glimpse into your mom’s life before you even existed!
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I know. I was blown away. I never knew he existed. My mom, who died in 1983, had kept all of his letters (and a couple of his photos) in an envelope in an old cigar box. How I would love to ask her about him now! Another find? An old black-n-white photo from c. 1925 which was labeled (“house Bobby was born in”) in my grandmother’s writing (my dad, “Bobby,” was born in 1925 in Calvin, ND, which was (and is) a micro farm town near the ND-Canadian border). I couldn’t believe my eyes when I saw that photo.
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Ah, how apt as I sit here surrounded by camping clutter…😉
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Im trying to do that every year…😂
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Every year older I get, the more all of my “stuff” weighs on me! I need a weekly purge habit at this stage.
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