Purge, don’t binge

Since Heather is doing one of her crazy I-have-lots-of-systems-and-rules projects again (see post below), I am going to try to support her. She wants to buy nothing new in February. Have fun with that, H.

I won’t mock the fact that you are buying extra stuff now in preparation of not buying anything later.

I respect her project and hate to throw away landfill-bound crap like an infant bathtub or cell phone charger for a phone I no longer use, so, inspired by Heather, I’m sort of on a Craig’s List/Freecycle kick myself. We are about to move into a 3-month furnished sublet while our house is demolished, er, remodeled, and I don’t want to pack up, move, unpack, repack, move and unpack anything I don’t really need.

So I have been packing up clothes, donating baby blankets, selling stuff on Craig’s List, and hoping for the rain to stop so that I can put a “free” box in front of my house with some cast-off items in it. Even with this attitude, I find it hard to work quickly through my piles of posessions. I get caught up in where things should go, wondering if I’ll miss them later. We’ve lived in this house for five years and have boxes of books and CDs that we never unpacked from our last house, but still somehow believe we should own. I sit down to attack a pile and get sidetracked by a million different aspects of this process. Clearly my process is faulty.

Here’s an example: I look at a vase. I think, “I don’t like this much now. Maybe I’ll like it later.” And then I look for a place to store it. On my way to looking for a place, I spot some things that seem easier to pack than the vase I don’t care for. I pick them up. Do you see the downward spiral happening? Do you think I should keep a vase that is nice, but just not my taste?

Today I saw this collection of books at Barnes and Noble. Boy was I tempted to buy all of them. I know Heather and I would have a lot of fun with a Closet Organizing book that comes with a DVD (birthday hint!) But then I remembered that I shouldn’t bring anything new into my house.

It’s All Too Much: An Easy Plan for Living a Richer Life with Less Stuff