Last week I was in a mood. These moods don’t happen very often – maybe twice a year. Assman gets really excited when I’m having one. It was a purging mood.
I wish I could find the before picture of our basement. I know I have one, because I sent it to my Dad and thanked him for instilling the pack rat gene in me. My basement looked exactly like his. Boxes filled just about every inch of the floor and were piled about as tall as me (granted, that’s not very tall to most people because I’m pretty short!)
Even though I was in a mood, it was still difficult. I experienced little glimpses of what a hoarder must go through. It can be quite distressing to throw away or get rid of stuff that you have some sort of attachment to, or must of liked at some point in time, because why else would you store it for ten or more years?
There was a lot of “oh, but so and so got this for me”. But then I would realize that it had not been out of the box since the Fraser house (this is how I remember things, not that I got it in 2003, or seven years ago, I remember things by which house we were living in at the time.)
There was also a lot of “why in the world am I keeping this?” I found paper plates (unused of course!) from the boy’s baptism and first birthdays! And streamers…so many half used rolls of streamers! They cost like a dollar – why did I keep them? Besides that, Assman hates them and has boycotted them for all future parties. Speaking of boycotts, we decided over the weekend to also boycott the loot bags that are sent home with kids at birthday parties. Parents end up spending $20-30 on small pieces of cheap, crappy toys just for the kids to take home for their parents to throw out, unless you have a hoarder parent, who may in a few years down the road unpack a box filled with years of loot bags and think to themselves, “why in the world did I save this?" Sorry for my ADD rant, back to purging.
The majority of the boxes were dispersed into different rooms, but I was able to get rid of about six Rubbermaid bins of “stuff”. I took two big boxes to the Salvation Army and I have two boxes in the laundry room of garage sale stuff. Assman does not like those boxes because I keep saying that I’m going to have this mysterious garage sale, but I have yet to do it! He will, however, be liking those boxes in a few weeks when we dig into them for our white elephant Christmas gift exchange with the gang. Our friends on the other hand may not be liking those boxes :)
At the end of the day, Assman was extremely proud of me for getting rid of so much junk, I mean stuff. And, I must admit, it was a great feeling to be able to see an organized and useful room again.
Until next time, unpack a box and see what kind of interesting things you can re-gift to your friends at Christmas and don’t forget to live, laugh and love! xoxo
