It’s that day of the week again – “Purge” day.
This is the day of the week where you pick one area, large or small, and decide what needs to be thrown out, what you are going to keep and what is going to be donated.
This week, I finished purging our CD collection.
Some, I kept. Most of them I donated and the rest I sold back through Decluttr.
I was able to sell back 30 CD’s and will earn $11.09 for them. That’s an average of 39 cents per CD. If that isn’t a punch in the gut for spending money on stuff, I don’t know what is.
Granted, some money is better than no money but it’s still a reality check on how much things depreciate in value. Just a good reminder the next time I make a purchase –
Today’s project was my oldest son’s bedroom closet.
Disclaimer: It’s been used for years as storage because he mostly uses his dresser. I started by making sure I had time blocked my day to accommodate this task. Yes, I still had client calls today but I spent the time while I was not on calls working on the closet. My goal was to get the closet cleaned out and go through as many of the boxes as I can today. Among other things, I found:
Baseball bats and a glove – no longer used.
My wedding dress, preserved in the box.
A box of cassette tapes. (That will be fun to go through!)
A box of toys no longer played with
A queen sized blanket ( I knew we still had that somewhere in the house!)
Clothes that no longer fit him.
Boxes and boxes of our wedding china. (still need to decide what to do with that)
While cleaning out the closet, I accumulated one bag of trash, one box of donations and the rest of the stuff is sitting on a table in the living room. I will go through it tomorrow and decide what to keep and what to donate.
This was definitely one of the bigger and more time consuming purge projects. And yes, I could have done this on a Saturday but I have found that it is always better to purge the kids stuff when they are not home. However, do NOT throw or give away things that might be important to them.
Purging kids stuff, especially as they get older is about balance. There are definitely some things I found that I thought would be ok to donate but I want to ask him first.
One suggestion – make a donation pile and then go through it with the child reminding them that these are things they no longer play with and so they would be a blessing to some other child. This gives the child some closure with their stuff and also gives them the understanding that you aren’t just home throwing all their stuff away while they are in school.
Remember, this purging process started almost two years ago. And, I started with smaller projects.
If you are new to purging, start with small projects like kitchen drawers, dresser drawers, cabinets, etc.
You can also pick one corner or wall of a room to start with and make progress from there.
The important thing is to get started –
What area in your house needs to be purged first?
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