6 week countdown!

Wow, we’re already on the 6 week count down to our condo move in!  How exciting.  :)  We’ve had a really busy week but we’ve made some headway on a few things.  

Last weekend, our first big project was the file cabinet.  We managed to go through our extremely stuffed four-drawer file cabinet and find a large pile of papers to throw away, an even bigger pile of papers to shred and we managed to dwindle everything down to one drawer of files that isn’t even quite full. 

It’s amazing how much paperwork we keep when it’s not really necessary.  I think it’s just that if you have space for it, you’ll find a way to fill up that space.  Now that we know we’re not going to have a ton of space to fill up, I bet we’ll be a lot more cognizant of what we keep.  For instance, we googled it to find out how many years you need to keep tax records and it turns out you only need to keep your last 3 years.  So the plan now is that every year we file our newest tax returns, we’ll get rid of the oldest, which will then be 4 years old.  So it turns out that we no longer needed those tax records we had from 1984!  Seriously… I’m not joking.  We had all our tax returns since 1984.  WHO does that?  Sigh…

We had just finished going through everything when the realtor called to tell us someone wanted to show the house in 30 minutes! Yikes!  We told her we’d be ready in an hour and went into overdrive cleaning everything up.  We finished with about 5 minutes to spare and the showing went great… no word on it yet but we’re keeping our fingers crossed.  :)

The next project we started was the Christmas decorations.  You’d think this would be really overwhelming but we had actually gotten rid of a lot of Christmas stuff the year before.  We currently had 2 large bins and 2 smaller bins, all completely full, of course.  We separated out the things we had to keep… tree skirt, stocking and precious ornaments.  I picked out a couple of my favorite Santa Clauses (that I started collecting each year almost 30 years ago!) and decided to let the rest go.  We put together a bin for each of the heathen children (it’s an affectionate term, for those of you who don’t know) and we completely eliminated one of the large bins of stuff.  We are keeping only one large bin so we downsized by about 75%!  Not too shabby!  Oh, and the beautiful Christmas tree went to a good home, too.  Really happy about that – I always loved that tree.

Next up was the collection I really wasn’t looking forward to because it was just so overwhelming.  The photo albums.  ALL THOSE PICTURES!  Whew… thousands.  Literally thousands of pictures to go through.  It was actually nice on one hand… a definitely walk down memory lane.  I don’t know that I’d ever actually gone through my entire collection of photo albums at one time before (thank goodness for good wine!)… but I did it Sunday afternoon (and evening… and night!).  I finally made it through them all but this was just the first go ‘round.  I counted them and there are 24 albums in all.

As I went through the albums I removed all the pictures that were just places (no people).  There were some great shots but there’s no need to keep those.  Trashed.  I also, oddly enough, removed pictures of people who I just wasn’t really sure who they were.  LOL.  Oh, they were usually in my house… I recognized that part… but I wasn’t sure who some of them were.  I may have known them 20 years ago but I didn’t need a picture of them now.  Trashed.

I started pulling out photos I could give to other people… my older sister, who I’ve always considered to be the keeper of photos in our family, is getting the biggest stash of them.  My younger brother is getting a large batch as well.  So is our wonderful family in New Orleans (they’re actually my firsthusband’s family but they kept me in the divorce!).  Then I had some great pictures to send to far away friends from over the years… I would like to see the looks on their faces when they get that package in the mail (mailed them earlier this week!).  I hope they enjoy them.

So this weekend, I’ll go through the photo albums (that have been cleared out quite a bit already!) with a new goal.  My goal is to pick out only my very favorite pictures from each album and put those into a new album that I will keep.  ONE album.  One.  Uno.  Wow… can I do it?  I think so… (cue the Little Engine…)  We’ll see.  :)

I’ll also put together an album for my daughter and one for my son and give those to them to keep.  I asked them if they’d want to go through the remaining photos to make sure there wasn’t anything they wanted to keep but they both said no, one album would be enough for them.  I wonder how many pics will be left when I’m done?  I may have to take those to my sister just to make sure she doesn’t any before they get tossed away.  Would that be enabling her?  :)  Surely not…

We’ll get started this weekend on gathering things up for the garage sale.  We’ve set the date for November 9th… the weather is forecast to still be pretty warm and my daughter has said she’s already got some baby stuff to add to the sale.  I’m sure we’ll end up with a garage full of stuff!  Whew…

So… here’s to a busy 6 weeks and a continuation of a very cathartic process.  :)