Death to stuff! Death to the Great Satan of cardboard!
Joellen and I have been advised that wee Riley will likely be compelled to be born the week of July 4th; we'll know a bit more after our ultrasound next week. We're attending an out-of-town graduation between now and then so, counting this weekend (which is already mostly over), we have three weekends left before the Big Day.
We have a guest room that's filled with boxes of stuff. When Riley is born, I would like the guest room to be instead filled with family members who will help us with our new parenthoodiness. To have room to put (and eventually sort out) the stuff, we need to clear out the other stuff that's in the garage. That stuff came from the bedroom that we've already converted into a nursery. To store and sort that stuff, we already had to clear out a big pile of stuff that we put in the garage when we moved in.
Needless to say, we've already put a lot of work in on this project. And we had (and still have) too much stuff.
Knowing that a lot of the stuff in the garage belongs to Joellen (I'm a packrat, but she's got me beat by a factor of ten), and she's only going to get less able to sit and sort stuff over the coming free weekends, I got out my whip and forced her to go out into the garage and sort stuff with me. Lots of it is getting thrown away, lots of it is going off to Goodwill, and we're keeping just a bit of it.
Above all, it frustrates me to see how much cardboard we've been storing for the last few years. All too often, we buy some piece of computer hardware or something, take it out of the box and put it to use, and then I say, "I better keep this box around in case something goes wrong with the hardware in the next couple of weeks, and I want to return it." So the the box gets tossed into one of our infamous storage rooms. So now I'm spending a lot of this weekend breaking down all of those boxes I've accumulated over the last two and a half years.
In addition to getting rid of large proportions of the stuff we've been storing for years, we're making a big upgrade to the way we store the stuff we want to keep, but really don't use regularly. From now on, that stuff will be stored in inexpensive, clear plastic bins in the garage. When we want to find that stuff, the plan goes, we'll be able to see into the bins much more easily.
Wish us luck!