Purge!

You know how one or two rooms in your house become the junk rooms? Clutter, stuff and just junk find themselves in "that" room. Our basement has really become our room for the junk and the discarded. (We also have one or two more rooms that are well on their way to junk room status.) Well, we've decided to stem the tide and bring our basement back from the brink.

We're pros at clutter. We have the bad habits of not putting things away right away. Things just find a place and "live" there. No table surface or inch of carpet is safe. It gets so bad that to "put things away" involves major neogoiations on "where things belong." This often becomes a serious relationship building experience. It's not just about your stuff and my stuff, but what the heck are we going to do with "our" stuff.

But back to the basement: we realized we couldn't spend time there without a risk to our health. (It got so dusty and dirty that Kathleen took to wearing a mask so she could breathe.) We both then realized we had to do something right away. The next step was to work out the finances of the clean-up.

I had tried to give away our sofa and love seat, but no charity would haul it away because the cats had clawed the sofas' arms. So I was stuck with convincing Kathleen to pay for the 1-800-Got-Junk people to just take the sofas away for a fee. Well they took the sofas away last week without stress, without holes in the walls and without any breakage. They did a great job. I'd use them again!

Now I'm waiting for Maid Brigade to come and clean the basement, which will be mostly dusting and vacuumning (a lot of both). After this is done, it's carpet cleaning time for the cat accidents and a general cleaning of the basement and the entire house.

We should be in pretty clean shape after all of this. Next task is clearing out old clothes to give away to charity. I'm even going to go through our bookcases and give away most of our books (minus our art, cooking and reference books).

We've lived in our house for over 12 years. And I'm sure we have brought more stuff in than we have hauled out. So the stuff has built up. And most of what we have we don't use anymore. So we'll give some stuff to charity and offer up the rest on Freecycle. And what we can't recycle, reuse or repurpose, we'll pitch into the trash or landfill.

So trust me, if there's hope for a clean and clutter-free house for us, there's definitely hope for you too!