We don’t realize how many things we collect until we move and have to get everything that we collected out of its hiding place. We knew that we had way to much stuff and were going to have to get rid of a bunch of it but we had no idea just how much stuff we had collected and honestly, it’s stuff that we never use. We’re moving from a 7 1/2 into a 4 1/2, (without much storage), so we have a lot of work to do.
We put a bunch of the more interesting, or valuable, items on Craigslist to try to sell them. We sold, among other things, a single bed with a mattress and linens, a kitchen table with 3 chairs, and a patio table with 4 chairs.
Everything else in the apartment was placed in one of three categories: keep, give away, and throw away. Everything that was put in the “keep” category had to have been used in the past year or we planned to use it soon. The exceptions to that rule were photos, important papers, books, and movies, (that I collect).
If something didn’t fit the “keep” criteria I had to sell it, give it to the Salvation Army, or throw it away.
Here’s the pile of things that we gave away, and our mountain that was left for the garbage pickup. We tried really hard to give away the couches but had to throw them away because the big one was too long for anyone to move. One guy even came to pick them up but it didn’t fit in his van – too bad.
Our mountain of garbage.
The mountain that we donated.