De-Stuff-Ifying: Progress Report

Well, we're more than halfway done with the year. (I know! Time flies like an arrow! And if you add "but fruit flies like a banana," you have just told my all-time favorite joke.) That means it's time for a progress report.

Do any of you remember that I started out the year determined to de-stuff-ify? I did. I was going to rid the House on the Corner of 100 bags/boxes of stuff during 2014, making my life 100 bags/boxes less cluttered. I started out gangbusters, and in the month of January took out 18 units of old clothes, books, unused dishes, tchotchkes and dust-catchers. Woo! This was going swimmingly!

But then spring hit and with it the unremitting schedule of weekend activities. During February, March, April, May, and June the total of additional bags/boxes of stuff out was 14 and that included a vigorous cleaning of the basement during which I unloaded the raw materials for several projects that would have earned me a spot on the Pinterest Fail page. (That's not my fail, but I'm right there with you in spirit, fellow spraypainter.)

Anyway, we finally had an uncommitted Saturday so I decided the entryway closet was going to be my next target. That oddly-shaped little hidey-hole at the top of the basement steps outside the kitchen door had become the depository for our recycling bins, the paperboys' canvas bags, bone meal for the roses, pretty much anything we didn't want in the actual house. It was long overdue for a thorough toss-out.

I learned something about myself as I dug stuff out of that closet on Saturday, and that thing was that apparently I think I can conjure up a clean house by purchasing cleaning supplies. (This is a fallacy; I am incapable of resisting a new-fangled mop, but my kitchen floors are still sticky.)

When I lined up all the mops, there were seven. Seven mops. Plus two bottles of ammonia, two gallons of Windex, two brooms, a bucket of sponges, and a gallon of white vinegar.

Huh.

Also three recycling bins (no longer used, since Small Town went to single-stream recycling), several thousand rubber bands for newspapers (the final Boy went out on the final paper route eight years ago),  three gardening gloves, a box of plant fertilizer that had burst, and the ceramic container that held a plant sent to me to celebrate Boy#4's birth. Plus other stuff.

When I finished ruthlessly disposing of bone meal and flea dip (awww, we miss Our Dog Pepper) the trash can was full (three bags out! yay!), and I had cleared enough enough room for the vacuum cleaner and other cleaning supplies to be moved out of the sewing room and consolidated in what I have designated as the new cleaning closet.

So how about those mops? Was I able to get rid of them? Well, no. Hope springs eternal that I will actually begin to clean some day and will need the scrubby mop, the Magic Eraser mop, and the plain sponge mop. Plus the two brooms (one for inside, one for outside).

It's not perfection but it's progress.