Today I cleaned out a large drawer in a dresser that has moved with me allof my adult life (I had this dresser in a college apartment). Here are a few things that I found: my hospital bracelet from my 30 year old son's birth, 4 first aid kits, maps of rural roads from a town that I lived in 27 years ago, some fabric I bought in France (I kept that), 2 point and shoot film cameras, tons of tissue paper to be reused for wrapping gifts, some old dot-matrix paper that I must have been saving for scratch paper, 2 5 year old sized children's t-shirts, three pairs of swim goggles ... Admittedly, this drawer was a rarity - it was more of a "junk drawer" and so kept lots of weird stuff. It is now 3/4 empty!
I know there have been discussions on this before but I'm ready to face it right now so hoping for some ideas on strategies.
We have a medium sized home and a medium amount of stuff but I'm ready to clear out all the stuff we don't use anymore and are unlikely to. I've been hitting a drawer, a closet, or a bookshelf a week but it is slow going. I want to be able to move should we chose to - or simply to be able to find what we have if we want to use it.
My goal is to be able to move if we decide to someday, to be able to more easily face projects like repainting a room, just to move stuff that we don't want on to either the trash, recycling, or a new home.
How do people approach this task when there isn't a specific deadline? A bit at a time? Any great strategies beyond the obvious 4 piles (keep, recycle, sell, give away)? I suspect I'm just making a first pass - getting rid of the obvious stuff but retaining some stuff that will go later.
Look forward to people's experiences.
I know there have been discussions on this before but I'm ready to face it right now so hoping for some ideas on strategies.
We have a medium sized home and a medium amount of stuff but I'm ready to clear out all the stuff we don't use anymore and are unlikely to. I've been hitting a drawer, a closet, or a bookshelf a week but it is slow going. I want to be able to move should we chose to - or simply to be able to find what we have if we want to use it.
My goal is to be able to move if we decide to someday, to be able to more easily face projects like repainting a room, just to move stuff that we don't want on to either the trash, recycling, or a new home.
How do people approach this task when there isn't a specific deadline? A bit at a time? Any great strategies beyond the obvious 4 piles (keep, recycle, sell, give away)? I suspect I'm just making a first pass - getting rid of the obvious stuff but retaining some stuff that will go later.
Look forward to people's experiences.