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??
My one thing would have to be a trailer we have stored with the contents from our winter house that was in Arkansas (We live in Missouri). I would love to just dump the contents (its been around 5 years since we sold it)…but my oldest child’s baby things are in it…so I need to go through it! But alas now I have inspiration! Thanks for sharing, can’t wait to have that feeling too!
It must feel great to have that huge job behind you now! I had grand plans for getting rid of unnecessary crockery during my week holiday, but it ended up being a job better saved for Summer. Instead, I had to content myself with making a start on organising my vintage knitting patterns.
It feels fabulous. I always think that any organising/decluttering job makes you feel better at the end!
I’m not a very good ‘culler’ but we certainly need to with our limited space. The problem is that so much of it is stuff we would use if we had more space and didn’t need to have everything packed away. I would certainly do more crafting if I could have it stored in a better way with somewhere to do it.
I think I have become better at culling as I got more into decluttering. We also lack storage, but between my decluttering, and being creative with how I store things, most of our things have a home. I did a recent craft cull, and was surprised by how much stuff I just didn’t want any more.
Your room sounds a lot like my entire unit. As i have been packing to move i have found stuff that should of be gone a long time ago. Going though 9 years of “stuff” is great. Ran out if time so everthing has been packed but have given myself 2 weeks to sort though the boxes.
We have been in the farm house for almost 5 years now, and there were still a few boxes that we never unpacked – I just got rid of them completely without even going through them. I figured that after 5 years, I didn’t really want anything in them.