LOL This post title makes me laugh!!!
We have a contract on our house. It is virtually sold. We are awaiting a settlement date from the banks and we will be moving out of our house.
At this point I have begun to pack and purge. Purge our binges, that is.
We decided to have a yard sale last week and we did a pretty good job of getting rid of a bunch of stuff. We sold a lot but at the end of the sale we didn't really want to pack it all back up and put it all back in the house for another sale later this month. So we did the inevitable. We packed it all up in two car loads and dumped it off at the Goodwill. I will take that tax deduction and not have to store the stuff again for a few more weeks. That wave is done.
Now on to the second wave. Ugh! The more I look at the stuff in our house the more I just want to get rid of it. Just back up a big dumpster and throw it all out the window into the dumpster. Part of it is my laziness in dealing with everything. The other part is that if I haven't seen it in a while then I probably won't miss it anyway. What makes me not get a big dumpster??? I am greedy. LOL I want to make a bit of money on the stuff I have spent my hard earned money on. I know a majority of it will end up getting donated anyway, but the last yard sale we had earned us $245. And that went a nice little way in paying for other things we needed, (food, gas, etc).
What I have found recently in sorting through my stuff is that we have "binged" on things. We decide we like something and then we have to have all of that something. For example I decided that I was going to collect Santas with pipes years ago. My first ornament given to me by my grandfather was a hand blown ornament of a santa with a pipe. So this collection began to evolve from there. When others in the family found out that I was collecting these my collection grew exponentially. I received them every year for my birthday and Christmas (which are close together). Any that we saw we seemed to buy. When our kids got old enough to start pulling things from the shelves, I packed them up in four large Rubbermaid boxes and put them in the attic. Each year I left them up there, not wanting to get them out and take the time to display every single one. Last week I pulled these boxes down from the attic and unwrapped each Santa. They all sat all over the kitchen table (who am I kidding, they are still sitting there.) I looked that them and realized a good majority of them I don't love. If I don't love them then I shouldn't keep them, right??? I played the "I can whittle this collection down to 10 Santas" game with my husband. Who gladly played along. He wrapped up the ones I picked and those are the ones I am keeping. It was a difficult decision with some because I know my husband went out of his way to get some of them, but I didn't love them. I had to talk to him about it and take the emotion of loving him out of my decision on some of the Santa's. Once we talked and I explained that I loved that he went out of his way and searched high and low to get me some, I just didn't love the Santa. He agreed that they should then go. And they did. I have two huge boxes of Santa's awaiting a yard sale and have put some of the vintage ones up on etsy to sell. I feel so much better with the ones I truly love and not have all the rest of them that I don't love just taking up space.
Speaking of space. For the next 6 months we will be living, a family of 5, in less than 400 square feet of space. We can't take our stuff with us. We must put it in storage. My ideal is to keep the minimum for setting up a house again and getting rid of the rest. I struggle with this though and I ask myself, "is this worth the expense of storage?" Lots of times the answer in the beginning is "yes" but later the answer becomes "no". This means that I am going through my stuff twice, getting rid of many things on the first wave and then having to make the hard decisions on the second wave. Ugh. This is an arduous and emotional process.
