When I posted DeCluttering Diary: Day One, last July on my first blog, EightyGo, I had no idea that it would go viral, or that our decluttering project would continue for so long. I thought we had gotten rid of most of the junk in our house. Oh, how foolish I was! Yes, I had cleaned out drawers and closets, upstairs and down, in our two story house, but I hadn’t begun to think about the basement.
Cleaning out the basement of a house that has been lived in by the same person for 50 years is an overwhelming project. My husband had two separate careers during that time, and there were boxes of newsletters awards, pictures, reports from all those years. But the majority of the shelves full of boxes were there before I arrived 30 years ago.
In yellowed, rotting cardboard boxes—unopened once they were sealed with masking tape a half century ago, were baby clothes, toys, scrapbooks, notebooks accumulated by my husband’s three children who are now in their fifties and sixties. His first wife had carefully boxed up invitations, wrappings and bows from wedding and baby showers through the years. We found boxes of tablecloths, ceramics, trip brochures, towels. Numerous fans, half empty paint cans, electrical cords—the list could go on forever. You wonder why anyone would have kept all that stuff. But, I, too came with some baggage—old yearbooks, awards, memorabilia from the 26 years I served as Director of Food Service at an acute care hospital. And of course, pictures of my three children from babyhood to parenthood.
You can see the truckload that emerged from our basement today. That’s in addition to another truckload last month. But we aren’t done yet. There are still odds and ends that we have to think about. Like the two oxcarts we purchased in Costa Rica 20 years ago. Maybe we can sell some of these things on E Bay. This winter, we’ll bring up the boxes of pictures and decide which ones to keep.
We thought we would be finished with all of this purging by Thanksgiving, but it looks like it will go on until spring.