Clean Sweeping, Part I

OK…so today my husband and I began the overwhelming task of de-cluttering our home. Now you should understand that we have been talking about doing this for months (maybe even years) but what finally motivated my hubby to start the process was his desire to replace our old TV in our bedroom with a brand new 32” HDTV. In order to make room for a larger TV in the bedroom, we have to move things around, necessitating the de-cluttering of more than one room. While this will be a multi-day process, Day 1 turned out to be more productive than I ever imagined.

The first thing we tackled was our DVD/video collection in the den. We still have a number of videos and, although I couldn’t get him to get rid of all of them, we did make a sizeable dent in their number. I wasn’t too successful with the DVD collection however. We started the day with 228 DVDs (yes, what can I say) and I managed to get him to agree to part with seven titles…yes, only seven. What’s worse is that I cannot get him to curb his need to buy almost every new DVD which is released for sale on Tuesdays. Oh well, eventually we will truly run out of room and then he will have to make the hard decisions. I bagged all the videos and DVDs and plan to take them to my former library where they can either add them to the collection or, more than likely, sell them in the Friends of the Library continuous “book” sale. Along with the DVD/video collection, we also managed to take six bags of clothing, four boxes of shoes, a golf bag with 2 clubs, and our old TV from the den to the local thrift store for donation.

Whew…I thought we were done but I was wrong. When we got back from the thrift store, we decided to tackle the boxes of Christmas and Chanukah stuff in the garage. We actually threw out a number of old ornaments and decorations as well as boxes and boxes of old holiday cards we never sent. I’d say we cut the number of decoration boxes in half which helped us move some stuff from the house into the garage for storage. What finally made us end our cleaning day was the realization that we’d filled our regular and recycle trash bins to the top and Trash Day isn’t until Wednesday. Oh well…at least it’s a start!