I moved in to this apartment with a lot of books and stuff. I think the pack rat part of me took comfort in being surrounded by my things, especially now that I’m living alone for the first time. I moved three times last year with all of this stuff, never going through any of it, most of it staying in piles and boxes.
For a while I had “Ikea bookcase” on the shopping list, until I finally realized that I don’t need more bookshelves, I need fewer books. This realization follows a long period of “I’ll get around to reading that” and the ever growing bedside reading pile. I used to read all the time, but these days so much else fills my days, between work, projects and stuff I read online (including long articles and ebooks). Last weekend I went through my large storage closet and my bookshelves. I have a pile of tech books I have no use for, so I’m giving them away at PLUG and TCF next month. A full three boxes of primarily fiction books was carted up to Gently Used Books in Douglassville, where they’ll be giving me store credit for what they can use, and donating the rest to local charities (yes, I could have sold them online and made a few bucks, but there simply isn’t enough money in used books these days to make it worth my time).
In addition to books, I was also able to go through the mountains of other stuff clogging up my closet, piles of paperwork and documents I haven’t had the heart to go through and cull until now. Unfortunately it needed to be done, I wasn’t able to find anything (where is my birth certificate?) and I kept stumbling upon things randomly that made my heart sink (oh, here’s my father’s death certificate! sigh…). I’ve now got all the vital documents sorted out and filed, threw away loads of junk and no longer have bags of books littering the floor of my bedroom closet, everything has a shelf. I then moved on to my piles of stuffed toys, thinking that I didn’t actually need over 100 beanie babies (certainly not ALL of them are important to me!) but quickly stopped my purge there, I can’t part with them right now, and parting with things prematurely will only hurt. Clothes are next on my list, I don’t have much that I don’t wear anymore, but now that winter is wrapping up (snowstorm this evening notwithstanding) it’s time to go through my closet and take inventory of what I actually wore this year, and what I’ll probably never touch again.
The purge extended beyond physical things though, and made it onto my wordpress blog, which is about as stripped down as I ever see myself going with a blog ever. My mirrored livejournal has similarly undergone transformation, as has twitter. Catch a theme yet? Bright and simple. Here’s to new beginnings!
Sunday, Mar 1st, 2009 at 15:08
I can relate. I’ve moved 4 times already, although not for the last 4 years. And sad to say that I’ve kept most of my stuff since. I still have stuff from when I was in pre-school. I don’t have the heart yet to part with them. I also have a mountain of stuffed toys that are just in boxes (NEVER! I’ll never give them away!) and since I graduated from uni about a year and a half ago, I also still haven’t thrown out stuff from my last 2-3 years of school. I just threw away my Engineering books and papers 2 years ago (after being in English for almost 2 years) so… maybe after another 2 years, I’ll be able to part with my Uni stuff. XD
I don’t have a lot of clothes to begin with so there’s nothing much to sort there. But I also have clutter (not clothes) in my closets.
My room is definitely full of clutter.
Sunday, Mar 1st, 2009 at 20:45
I try to follow the hangar method for determining if I’ve worn something or not. I *always* hang clothes to the right of whatever section they belong in (turtlenecks, long sleeves, etc..) whenever I put them up from doing laundry. Then I just start at the left and put things in a box until I find something I remember wearing. They stay in the box until the beginning of the next season, if I didn’t open the box, it all goes to Goodwill.
Suits and fancy dresses are exempt from this sorting, although I hate wearing them, I know I need them :(