Plus two bags of linens. It feels AMAZING. Two of those bags have actually been packed to go for two years! I feel light, like a little bird.
Of course, I still have miles of laundry to do and lots of stuff to consign, but I’m making real serious progress and getting rid of stuff for good.
Isn’t it a great feeling?
When we moved we got rid of 6 bags of stuff (clothes mainly, some toys too iirc) to the Women in Need thrift stores (they helped us a lot years ago, so I try to give back where I can). It was liberating, plus we had fewer things to move that we didn’t use.
I’ve just been to a car boot sale - I bought nothing - plus I had nothing to add to my friends table. Mwah ha ha. My friend had this weird little pottery bottle with on a string. Someone picked it up saying what’s this. “It’s a curio for your patio”, I said - and they bought it. Someone bought the breadmaker AND the chip slicer. We were cackling like witches.
Well done **Zsofia **- it’s truly liberating.
Yeah, and then motherfucking Himself doesn’t want me to clean anymore, even though he’s always bitching about the house and completely overestimating his contributions to its cleanliness (he cleans ONCE and you’d think it was the Apotheosis of the Laundry or something) because he’s sick and then he went and filmed his weekly TV show, which is called Drinking in the Morning but is it not common sense that you don’t drink when you’re sick? And then the bedroom is the only dark room in the house and I “make too much noise” picking up trash. I could strangle him only it wouldn’t be a fair fight with him sick and all. He actually got into the bed which was covered with CAREFULLY SORTED piles of laundry, consignments, etc., and shoved half of them off. Murder dwells in my heart.
I went through my crochet patterns last night/today. I want to get rid of 2/3 of them (and gawd - where my mind was when I bought some of them, I have no idea). Not quite sure how I am going to get rid of them yet, but they are ready to go.
The best thing we did was to sell our house. We got rid of 10-15 boxes of books alone. I went through my clothing and ditched ALL of my work clothes: ties, slacks, shirts, suits, shoes. Then got rid of jeans and other stuff I’ll never fit into again, and can buy if I ever get that thin. Then dumped almost all of those souvenir t-shirts that everybody accumulates. Then got rid of most of the winter crap and excess coats and boots. When I was done, there were enough clothes left to maybe hang in a broom closet. It’s totally liberating, but even so we ended up shipping 12,000 pounds of “stuff”.
During the past two years of underemployment I’ve been slowly sending items off to Goodwill. Feels good when I do. One day I hope to reclaim the front room entirely.
Congratulations. I can’t tell you how much better and lighter I feel, having got rid of something like 2/3 of my clothes, 80% of my books, and about 1/2 my CDs over the course of two house moves within 5 years. I now don’t buy anything permanent unless I actually need it.
Doesn’t it feel great?
I try to take advantage of libraries as much as possible, but I often end up buying books anyway during trips. Bringing a bunch of fluffy novels to the local School of Languages is Christmas for the librarian and clear shelves for me! She gave me a card so I can borrow books from them any time I want to, even though I’m not a student 
Aww…and next weekend is the library annual used book and DVD/CD sale. I guess I better not go and bring home a lot more useless clutter…
KIDDING! No way would I miss the annual treasure hunt! I look forward to it every year, always say I’m not hauling home a ton of stuff, and of course I do. But I do go through my bookshelves on a regular basis and take stuff back TO the library, to put in the ‘donations’ bin.
Why is it so hard, though, to part with certain things? My needlework kits? A quilt someone made for us when we got married? Those scores of dusty old VCR tapes of movies I taped 10 years ago? I mean to bag it up and take it away, and somehow, I just can’t do it. Maybe I’m a beginner hoarder?
The other day I was sitting around thinking how I need to just get rid of all my clothes, sort of like what Chefguy did. I said to myself “ok the next time someone calls looking for donations, they’re gone.”
Purple Hearts Veterans called that very afternoon, so I’ll be going through my closets and drawers this week and giving away almost everything. I think I wear about 10 shirts and 3 pairs of pants, but somehow manage to take up 2 closets. It can all be replaced. It’s all got to go.
I’m looking at yet another card from Amvets saying they’ll be in my neighborhood and all I have to do is shift my lazy ass into gear and put crap out on the curb (paraphrasing).
On the other hand, it says “We especially need your good usable clothing.” If I really thought my clothing were usable, I’d still be using it. I tend to wear stuff until it falls off in shreds. I can see some of my discards being used to clothe the clothesless, but I’m afraid if I donate it to an organization that wants things to sell in thrift stores it will just end up discarded or might even cost them money to get rid of.
Being a long time devotee of thrift stores, I wan to say thank you, not only for helping poor people but also the environment.
Everything that gets a new life is a thin not filling a landfill and not being replaced with something new. Win-win.
Maybe you could put them into an envelope labeled “X# of Crochet Patterns–Baby blankets, hats, etc.” (or whatever you’ve got) and give them to the thrift shop–in other words, put them into some sort of format that they can just throw on the shelf to sell. I’ll bet someone would be happy to get those.
I’m happy because the local group that formed out of my Obama group has adopted a local homeless shelter, and this week, we can drop off bags of clothes one one member’s porch. Which is right around the corner from me! Nice to have a deadline in this case.
I made an appointment at the consignment shop for next Saturday (you have to make an appointment if you want to bring more than 15 things, and you take them and leave them and it’s not your call if they keep them or donate stuff - otherwise you have to show up between 10 and 5 on a Tuesday, which…?) so I have GOT to get that shit together. It has to be washed and unwrinkled and on hangers, and of course I have probably ten things that have been ready like that for more than a year now. So since I’ve been doing laundry nonstop, for the clean clothes that I actually wear to go into drawers and on closet rods, there must be a Great Purge. A Night of the Long Knives. A “yes, I will probably lose weight again when I get back into the running habit again, but I will never, yes never, be a size 2 again unless I get tuberculosis” reckoning. Because my closet is full, but I have a seperate rack for work clothes and the dresses I actually wear and can fit into hang on a rack on the back of the bedroom door… so what’s in the closet? It’s a mystery! The kind of mystery that could be lucrative!
And let’s be clear, all of you "oh, I love that sweater"s that I mean to wear, and I put you on every so often and I take you off because there’s just something not right about you? You’re going.
I’m the same way, as I mentioned in the thread about the show on A&E. I’m not living in filth, but I can definitely empathize with some of their guests, to a scary degree. For them – ergo, to me, to a lesser extent – it’s about thriftiness and clinging to the past. I have a horrible memory, so part of me believes I’ll completely forget parts of my life if I don’t have mementos there to remind me. Donating stuff always feels much better than throwing it out, whenever possible (noticed it on the show, too – one guy finally agreed to give away his old aquariums but took them back when he foudn out they were headed for the dump).
Yay!! It’s such a good feeling! We recently got rid of a couple of carloads of stuff at Salvation Army and have much more to go, but at least soon we’ll be able to actually see our basement storage room floor.
There was a big community yard sale the other day and I was commenting to Moon Unit that those are useful, but it’s easier to donate stuff since you can do it on your schedule. She remembered a local school that has a flea market in its parking lot every month or so, and she said she really wanted to go to it.
I told her “we’re trying to GET RID of our OWN crap, and you want to go buy SOMEONE ELSE’S CRAP???”.
She snickered and agreed that maybe we didn’t need to go to the flea market.
My wife works for a non-profit which runs their own thrift store. For years, it did…ok. About two months ago, they A) moved to a much better location, and B) ditched the two slackers who ran the place and took on two new people who actually wanted people to shop there.
Within a week, the company realized they had a serious problem: people wanted to buy things from them.
They had been sitting on the same inventory for months, simply because the old place had been so uninviting. So the call went to to everyone in the company – “We need your old stuff!”
My wife told her mom, who donated a ton of items. My wife’s mom told all her friends and co-workers, and suddenly we found that every time we visited my in-laws, we were coming home with the van packed top to bottom with the old belongings of people three and four degrees removed from us.
So finally, the other day, I took a look in my closet. My eclectic collection of button-down shirts – man, I like them. But the fact is, they’re the shirts that I bought for the office. And I telecommute now – I haven’t worn any of them in about three years now. So, out they went. It’s amazing how much closet space I have now!
My husband says the exact same thing. As my FIL once put it, “If he [my husband] could have saved his shoelaces from third grade, he would have.”
OTOH, I keep gently pointing out to him that he doesn’t need a memento of every single little thing in his life. Clothes he hasn’t worn since college, for example.
He goes into a frenzy if I even think about donating anything of mine because he’s convinced I’ll become just like him and will therefore lament about this or that for the rest of my life :rolleyes:
There was a Hoarders marathon on Saturday and I was getting itchy just watching that. But I had just taken a couple of boxes of stuff to the thrift store and trash/recycling, so I knew I was in good shape. The house feels so much lighter!