It’s been a while since I shared a one thing. One thing is doing that thing that isn’t part of your everyday routine, but is something that you have been meaning to do forever. If it ever stops raining around these parts, our builder will appear and need to knock some big holes in our house, so my one things at the moment are all about getting ready to move out of our house temporarily. I will be darned if I move one item that I don’t actually want or need.
So with the school holidays giving me a little time, I’ve been tackling ALL THE THINGS! The kids books – culled all the picture books we never loved anyway (Toby is reading simple readers now). My clothing – got rid of anything not worn in the last 12 months. Our books – anything we will never read again is gone. Kids clothing – there’s a bag for my sister, and 3 bags for the Op Shop. I have made the kids clear out the hoards in their cupboards (though to be fair, Hannah doesn’t hoard – she’s a chucker like me!).
The big thing we have tackled though, is the unlined storage room off our back veranda. Before we moved, our house had been largely empty for the previous 10 years. Country Boy’s family had all used it to put odd bits of furniture, boxes of unwanted china and house hold goods, and other random crap. When we moved in we got rid of the spare beds and mattresses (there were eight single beds in the house), and stacked the rest of the stuff into the unlined spare room.
Now this room used to be Country Boy’s grandfather’s office. In it was still paper work from when he ran the farm, and even some of his father’s (CB’s great grandfather) belongings. Old family farms often have generations of junk built up, because noone knows what to do with the no longer wanted stuff (remind me to write about this in more detail sometime!). In the four years since we have moved into the house, we had added a drum kit (didn’t know where else to keep it), a chest freezer, a few chairs, and a few boxes of jars (always handy). To complete the chaos, the kids had climbed in on top of all the junk and created a cubby.
Clearly something needed to be done. But the room was messy, dusty, and full of hard decisions (many of which, weren’t mine to make anyway), so despite my constant dread of clutter, I had closed the door and avoided the problem.
Well no more!
When CB’s sister was visiting a few weeks ago, she had a look through her bits and pieces, and took the few things she wanted. Then last week CB and I bit the bullet, and began hauling things out of the room. Old cushions (ewww), university notes from the 1990s, jigsaw puzzles glued into frames etc went to the dump. Boxes of jars etc to the shed where they should have been in the first place. All the old cutlery, crockery, and decorations were consolidated.
My mother in law came down and had a look through everything to make sure that there was nothing that was a family heirloom. Turns out we don’t have many of those (hehe).
CB rang the antique shop in town, and organised for them to come and check out our collection next week. Anything not wanted goes to either Vinnies or the dump.
The freezer is still in the room (and will be there until we move out in a few weeks), and there are a few other bits and pieces of ours in there, but all the miscellaneous junk, the things that should have never been kept in the first place have gone.
Yep I’m feeling mighty happy after ticking this one off the list!
Have you been Spring cleaning? What’s on your One Thing list??
