my recent project is cleaning out the garage. well it already was "cleaned" out this summer but now my car is in it and my dad worked really hard to get hooks and other things to organize it so that my car fits in it better.
the last of the clutter is the crazy messy wall o junk and then the organized everything is in a clear bin wall. the messy junk wall is really messy and well its stuff we use at least once a month so i am not going to be messing with that yet. what i am working on is the *organized* bins.
OMG- these bins are filled with junk. lots and lots of junk. then under the junk you find cool stuff like a project my brother did when he was in first grade, my Bat- Mitzvah prep book, a dress that i clearly painted on when i was 3 years old, video of my brother's piano playing, but then its back to junk.
I know for a fact that we have not opened a single one of these containers for pretty much the entire time we have been living at this address. how do i know? because one container was full of things that were once in my room.... from the house we lived in before i went to college. so these bins have been full of junk for about 7+ years now.
this means that we put stuff in these bins to store while we moved. they got shoved in some space then when we moved again we just shoved them in the garage.
Now I used to LOVE LOVE LOVE watching hoarders, but after an incident that occured in our garage this summer... i can no longer watch the show as i realized there is a mild case of hoarding in my house. I had my mom donate about 15 bags of blankets, towels, linens, etc to a animal shelter and now we have all this space in my linen closet. I cleaned out the spice cabinet to discover organization there, I cleaned out my room- that was the best feeling ever. but once i got to the garage this summer- holy cow!
so there is my approach to cleaning out the garage- I am throwing away things i know for a fact we are never ever going to use*- or things that i mine that i haven't seen in 7 years and don't care for. when it comes to pictures, projects from when i was little, or other memory type items, i leave them be. things that we really dont need, but i know if i throw out before asking I keep.
my plan is to then go through the bins with my mom because most of the stuff is her craft things, holiday things, and a huge majority is her work stuff. she always will look at something and say "oh i told some one i would give them X so hold on to it."
this plan has allowed me to empty out 3 large tubs and one smaller one. this will let us get all teh junk out of the basement so that can get repaired and then we can countinue purging.
~Heather
*honestly i would love to donate some of this stuff, but alot of what i am throwing away is actually complete trash and not things people need. like a random plastic handle, dried up markers, half colored coloringbooks
