Get rid of stuff

I visited my parents house in Seattle over the weekend. Since I came back to L.A. via car (helping little bro bring his car out to college) I took this opportunity to clear out the rest of my stuff from the parents’ house.

This means there are two large, dense, boxes of new stuff that came into the apartment last night. However, I am hoping I will be able to get rid of much of it after scanning into the computer. I just didn’t have time to do that sort of thing in a single weekend, so I had to bring it home with me. I am also proud of myself for resisting the temptation to bring back many unnecessary kitchen implements offered by my mother.

The good news is, when I came back to my apartment after 5 days away, it seemed so clean and streamlined! Partly, it’s that my parents’ house is so messy that any apartment would seem clean in comparison. But, I really do think that my apartment is quite decluttered compared to the average American apartment.

In fact, I have just decided to mark this goal off as “complete” (although I probably could get rid of a little more stuff) and replace it with the goal, “simplify.” That’s really more in line with what I have been trying to do by getting rid of stuff.

In the past week, I’ve thrown out two ratty pairs of shoes, and put another never-worn/never-to-be-worn pair of DH’s in the bag to donate.

dropped off yesterday at Goodwill.

This guy is hardcore. He’s trying (at least initially) to cut down his personal possessions to 100 Things…with a lot of exceptions. His ground rules aren’t completely clear at this point, but with all his exceptions 100 Things sounds pretty do-able for me. Then again, I’ve never really counted up the number of things I own. Also, I would probably group things more than he does for the purposes of counting.

It’s an interesting idea, but I think I’ll wait for him to finish (end of August?) before I commit to anything similar.

We gave away about half of our videos to DH’s family (since we’ve gotten rid of our VCR.) Next time my parents visit (or I visit them) I’ll give them a chance at any of the remaining videos.

Since I bought some new makeup yesterday, I threw away a lot of old makeup. I got rid of much more makeup than I actually bought, so it’s a net decrease of stuff in my house. I also put my nail polish + remover in a box to take to the hazardous waste drop-off next time it’s open. I decided to get rid of all my nail polish, partly prompted by this article at Unclutterer.

Also, I took two bags of random stuff to Goowill including some clothes, books, and craft materials. I also dropped off my VCR, since I decided (and DH agreed) that we didn’t use it very often. We are going to give our parents a chance to take any VHS videos of ours that they want, and then we’ll drop off the leftover ones at Goodwill, too. I found getting rid of the VCR to be very liberating. Now there’s more space in the TV stand and I won’t waste time looking in the VHS-for-sale bin at Blockbuster.

It’s gotten to the point where I can no longer make a circuit around the house and identify multiple things that should be given/thrown away. At first I thought “oh, I guess I can mark it off as done on 43Things.” But then I realized, no, this means I’ve finally gotten to the meat of the problem.

I am going on vacation for a week, and maybe when I get back I can look at the apartment with fresh eyes.

The old computer that has been sitting idly in the junk corner for most of a year is finally disposed of! DH and I spent a really long time opening up the hard drive so we could smash it.

Yippee!

I dropped off four more paper bags of stuff to Goodwill after work today.

In preparation for getting rid of our last computer that can read floppy disks, I went through all my old floppy disks and moved the files onto the computer (eventually to be burned onto a CD.) I had forgotten about the sound that reading floppies makes. Strangely annoying and soothing all at once. I’d also forgotten how slow the data transfer is! I got some reading done in the meanwhile.

of stuff I just collected from around the house. I plan to drop them off at Goodwill tomorrow morning. Let’s see if I can make it three bags before then.