In their guest space, there’s a drawer with a box of orphan cords my kids have forgotten after visits.
While cleaning out the Halloween boxes, I found a set of Halloween crosswords, word searches, etc. that I had created and printed out when I was a room mom. I put them to the side before deciding what to do with them. Well today I tackled that pile, and gave one to my mom (who has dementia and lives with me). She was excited like a school kid. She worked hard on those puzzles for hours tonight. She used to do word searches a lot, but had started pushing them aside so I hadn’t given her any for quite a long time. Those Halloween word puzzles are having an accidental, fun, second life!
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Donated another 6 bags including those cords. Yea! Can’t believe I have so much stuff tucked everywhere. But it’s getting close to done.
Even have room now in the file cabinet–my H actually went through files! Yea! (that was a shocker!)
Think I’ll tackle linens today and see what I come up with.
Nice to have some space and organization.
I donated two boxes of canned food to the local food pantry. Hubby buys a dozen cans of things we don’t even eat if they go on sale: pork and beans, kidney beans, garbanzo beans, refried beans. I hope the poor like beans.
It’s been months since I was last on here, but found my way on this evening (work night shift) and read the entries since my first one April 1 this year. Much has transpired, but the effort to clean out my home continues. A major piece of progress was getting the rest of the insulation out of the basement ceiling, with the help of my 2 college kids in August, for which I’m very grateful! Some residue remains, all manageable. My beloved has continued to stockpile items for ebay listings from now to next spring, in spite of my insistence “no more bulky items.” In come old guitars, tools, scientific instruments, and more books. I’ll make an effort to purge more from the basement before winter.
I want to clear out front room, so we’ll have living space for the fall, holidays, room for a Christmas tree, and family. It has occurred to me over this past year that we need to update our estate file (will, health care proxy and POA, as well as passwords to different applications, etc. With this goes the realization that (like everyone else in this generation), our kids dont want our stuff. Realizing some of the material we’ve been collecting over the decades is valuable, and that if the markets crash - as they will at some point, (given our national debt, etc.), we’re better off selling these things now while we can, rather than trying to sell when no one has money to buy. So after review, we sent off a number of our best pieces to auction, with the hoped-for proceeds going to college bills.
We lost a couple of family member this year and last, which means needing to update wills which are 5-7 years old and now out of date. I dont want to leave our kids the house the way it is so need to continue efforts to clear stuff out. If we can get to that point, I hope to go through and consolidate records, files and anything we can get rid off so as to make their task easier. A lot of work, but I’ll feel better getting as much done as we can the remainder of this year. Fingers crossed!
I’ve really slacked off here but yesterday I got some things together for the local coat drive.
Two wool coats, two parkas, a pair of boots and a pair of snowpants will be going this week.
^^ I was hoping you were giving them away because there will be no snow this year!! 
I’m sitting down right now to list a few things on eBay - H started a side business when he retired and while it drives me nuts (all the stuff!) most of the time I do appreciate getting some $$ for the better items.
Donated another trunk load. Should visit the bragging thread!
We had a box full of paper cups and plates that kiddo bought for some school function. No longer needed, so I asked our young friends if they could use it for their team. They were happy to take the box! Yay. Also, gave away one of my Dutch ovens.
Oooooo, I’d love a Dutch oven. We should set up a CC swap-meet!
Wouldn’t that be fun!?
I filled another bag of miscellany from random kitchen drawers, mudroom, and laundry area. Hopefully I’ll drop off tomorrow. Lots of progress here, and much left to do.
I’m now in keeping-up-with-the-falling-leaves season and wish I could be doing the bag-a-week club instead. Sigh.
@rosered55 if you bag your leaves, come here and tell us about them!
Last night I made order out of chaos. It didn’t result in getting rid of anything, but I still feel good.
We have a drawer in which we keep DH’s “extra” gloves, scarves, hats. You can imagine what that drawer looks like . . . I took everything out of it, confirmed with DH that Yes, of course he wanted to keep everything (sigh . . . ), and put it all back into the drawer – but this time in little baskets. One contains the leather gloves, one contains the wool gloves, one contains the scarves, and one contains the hats. It’s a thing of beauty!
And I was able to throw out the one glove that didn’t have a mate.
We’ll see how long that drawer stays organized.
So I cleared out a kitchen drawer…H comes in and says “Hey! Where’s the such-and-such?”
I told him I PUT IT AWAY where it actually belongs!
Reply “No wonder I couldn’t find it”.
Guess I can’t count getting rid of a 50 gallon water heater since we are getting a new one to replace it.
Yes! of course you can! Many would insist that it go in the yard/basement/garage so that they could sell the parts–or whatever.
I remember after living in our house about 10 years looking at the side of our carport to find out H had been putting
piles and piles of wood and stuff on the side. The problem was that our lovely neighbors had a large window that
looked directly at that pile. Man was I furious. He still argued with me.
OMG. This looks like the chair we dropped off at the local goodwill. Of course, ours was not a designer made one, it was a purchase on a whim at a Costco eons ago.
Did a little cleaning and threw out a bunch of random crap while babysitting contractors.
What @oregon101 said. The things my ex-husband insisted on keeping… Yuck.