The Drive to De-Clutter

I'm taking the next few work days off (5 day weekend) to work on something that started gnawing away at me a few months ago. Clutter. Our house has become remarkably full of stuff over the past three years that we've lived here. I generally have been working hard at keeping stuff neat and tidy, but when I open cupboards, closets, or drawers I'm flabbergasted by how full they are.

"Enough!" I said. "This is ridiculous! We don't use half this stuff and never will!"

Initially, Matt thought I was going through a nesting phase, but it's lasted a few months. Some of the foolishness we have is items we had planned to sell at a garage sale before we even moved into our house. Some of it came from my grandma's house after she died and we had to sell her place. Other stuff came from my parent's house. It was either stuff that belonged to me as a kid or stuff my mom thought would be useful in our house. You'd be amazed at how easily it all piles up in a short time period.

Honestly, I needed a couple years to finally feel okay about parting with the stuff that came from my grandma's house. It was too hard to let go when I remember her telling my mom how she would lie awake at night and think about where her furniture would go in our new house after she died. She said it gave her something to concentrate on other than the pain from her cancer. At the same time, my grandma wasn't one to hold onto stuff. She kept a pretty minimalist house in terms of knick-knacks, books, magazines, and other dust-gathering bits. Because of that, I feel like I'll be honoring her memory better by sorting through everything once and for all to see what we can sell at a garage sale in July.