The purge is in full swing. The purge of the house, that is. Since last Monday we have, room by room, begun purging our house of the useless, the recyclable, the donatable, the Ebayable, the decrepit and so fourth and so on. It's a good feeling. It's alot of work. We are gaining space. "What will we do with all this extra space?" Julie asked. Not a damn thing! Space should remain space. It is not meant to be refilled. Mind you, none of this involves cleaning. That comes later. The point is to review the contents of the area and then decide what happens with them. Once the house has been purged, we go back through with the mop and the rags and the scrub brushes.
In other news, the Christmas shopping was completed before Thanksgiving and the packages were mailed out yesterday. Thus, the time to purge.
Purging stuff at my house seems to be an ongoing project. My wife and I seem to do just a little bit at a time here and there. We've given lots of stuff to Goodwill, Salvation Army, the used furniture store in town run by a local church, or recycled it on our local Free-Recycle yahoo list.
ReplyDeleteWe don't have a lot of room in our house for stuff to begin with since our house is not only small by today's standards, but we're on a slab (as is the case with all the houses in our neighborhood). One of our goals for the house is to always have room to park both cars in the garage. Unfortunately, we need to have two cars because of our respective employment locations eventhough we live in a fairy walkable community. I wish we only needed one car at most (no car would be better still, but that's not possible in most places in America). I hate the damn things. The fact they they are a totally unsustainable form of transportation aside, they simply consume huge amounts of money.
Anyway, almost all of the people in the neighborhood have their garages packed so full of stuff they can't use them. We've vowed not to let that happen to us. Besides, during winter especially, it's nice not to have to clean snow off of the car at 5:30 AM.
Until a week ago, we had three cars. I had been keeping my old compact pick-up truck with 178k miles mainly for things like getting manure from the local stables for our garden, going to the local greenhouse to get gardening stuff, or the hardware/lumber store stuff for maintenance projects around the house (houses are money pits too, but you have to maintain them). After doing the math, I realized that it was rather stupid of me to pay $415/year for insurance and license tags for the truck for as little as I actually use it. Besides, who really needs to have 3 cars?
I found it rather liberating to get rid of the thing, and it's nice to look out the window and not see it taking up space in the driveway.
Getting rid of stuff is always a good feeling.