Working Weekend

Saturday I went to my sister Brooke's new place to help her unpack the stuff for her studio. She has been patiently waiting for over a year to have a room for her creativity and now she finally has it. Or so it would seem. The third bedroom/proposed studio was piled to the ceiling with boxes, mostly books, cleaning stuff, winter clothes, mementos, car stuff and just everything that didn't have a place somewhere else in the house. It was overwhelming but with the two of us in synch, we felt up for the job.
First thing I did was open the window, and began tossing out stuff we knew had to go. It was FREEING.
It didn't take long before it became obvious that we needed to get a couple of bookcases if all these books were to be stored on shelves and not in cardboard boxes. Adding some task lighting and a sewing chair to our list, we stopped midway in the purging to go to Target. We had luck on our side and found just the right things on sale. Woowoo!
By 4pm the sewing machine was set up, the bookcases filled, and tons of trash had been hauled off to the dumpster. We felt triumphant. Only one of the bookcases got used and so I returned to Target to exchange it for another brilliant floor lamp that we had gotten for Brooke. Gone. Already. Pooh.
I brought home to our garage five or six bins filled with stuff that needed to be stored for the future.

And then today I woke up late. No wonder. But I was still on a roll and before I drank my second sip of coffee I walked out to the garage and surveyed my challenge. Three big Uhaul Garment boxes stacked in the corner needed to be unpacked. This is my stuff, still packed three years later. I had no idea what was in them, but I was still in the purging mode, so I dove in with enthusiasm.
Ha! Winter clothes that Brooke, I or my niece might wear, or might go to Goodwill, pillows, bedspreads, clothes hangers (???), and one box that had almost nothing in it. I had already re-distributed things so that I might have more room in my closet, so they had a place to go until we sort through it all.
I won't bore you with more along this line, but to say that there is NOTHING that is not on a shelf now, or on the garage floor or in a dirty cardboard box and I have all the flattened cardboard in the van to go to the dump. Yay!!! There are nine empty Rubbermaids to show for my organizational prowess, and the knowledge that I have a tiny bit of my life under CONTROL.

All of this was inspired by the lovely and talented Empress of Dirt. Thanks Mel of the North.