The boy and I spent some quality time in the last week of 2011 doing a serious clean up of our spare bedroom. Over the course of the last year it had morphed into the catch all room where we hid things when cleaning up quickly before company came over. It was also one of the rooms that has been blocked off from our foster dogs (to help control the dander in our home for our friends who have allergies) so it was very much “out of sight, out of mind”. We spent the better part of one of our joint days off the week between Christmas and New Year sorting through boxes, organizing wrapping paper & bows, and reminiscing over artifacts from college, high school, and well some from even before HS. I even managed to find some old correspondence with my since deceased uncle, so that was a bit of a trip.
All of this is a long way of saying that 2012 has turned into the year of the purge for us.
I am officially dubbing 2012 as “the year of the purge”. We’ll get rid of things from our house that aren’t being used.
#purgeallthethings— Erin (@LittleWitKnits) February 3, 2012
This month we’ll celebrate 4 years in our house and yes, of course, there are still boxes that haven’t been unpacked. Those boxes mostly reside in the spare bedroom and contain those fun artifacts from HS. My goal in January was too sift through one of those boxes a week (or one of the matching boxes in my office) to the point tht I could toss the box out and everything had been put away. I made strides in that arena but then my focus shifted to other areas of the house. This week we returned to the spare bedroom to fix the closet system which spontaneously fell down one day in January. I also made great personal progress by sorting through all the stuffed animals that I decided at 17 I could never live without. There is now a good sized pile of stuffed animals to be gifted and donated. 🙂
In the basement I’ve been working on consolidating my yarn storage into plastic bins and downsizing my overall footprint in the basement. Now the room seems more like a movie room than a yarn and fiber shop! 🙂 Of course this has led to an update in the number of items I’ve added to my lazy girl destash bin which has now taken over a corner of the guest bedroom. Oh and my destash got a little less lazy with me actually posting in the ISO/Destash group on Ravelry. The boy even commented the other night on my consolidation and said that it looked really good.
Pardon the old picture, but imagine this over flowing and containing at least 4 sweaters’ worth of yarn
If you pop on over to my stash page on Ravelry you can check out all the yarns that are looking for a good home. 🙂 There are several single skeins, some twin skeins, some partial skeins of fancier yarns, some discontinued yarns, and at least 4 quantities of sweater yarn.
As the year progresses and the purge continues I find that I am feeling really good about it and can feel a bit of a weight coming off my shoulders as we work to condense the things that we do not need. On the flip side, by condensing the things we don’t need we find we’re enjoying some of the things we already have more. Like our counters! Who knew how much space there is in a kitchen when it’s all cleared of clutter and junk? We’re also targeting the items in our kitchen and dining room that aren’t being used. I am pretty certain some family members will be on the receiving end of these clean ups and we may finally have a bit more cohesive look to our dishes. 🙂
At some point this year we’ll need to address the storage half of our basement and the crawl space. But for now we’ll stay upstairs and I will work on another form of pairing down – creating things with my fiber, yarn and fabric stashes. I’ve even started to work on that some but that’s for another post. 😀
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