stuff in closets

By my reckoning, we will live in our current home for 77 more days.  The packing and purging we've been doing gets more and more serious.  We're hitting up friends for cardboard boxes.

As I keep reminding my husband (and what the heck, as I keep reminding myself) it's so much easier to think about packing the stuff we can see than the stuff we've forgotten about.  My guy has asked me about a half-dozen times about the clothes in his bedroom closet, the books sitting on the shelves in plain sight  I pointed him to the cardboard boxes of photographs stashed in a cupboard in the basement, essentially ignored the entire two decades we've lived here.

I've been taking my own medicine.   I open cabinets that I seldom open and look at what's in there.   I don't even ask the popular question,

• Does it spark joy?

Instead I ask:

• Do I really want to keep this?
• Do I really want to pack this up in a well-labeled box?
• Do I really want to figure out where this goes in the new house?

A drawer with a few less corks and screws than before.

And I keep finding things for which the answer is "no".  For example, we're keeping one (count 'em, ONE) wine bottle opener, and one stopper.  And we're storing the rest of them "in the cloud".

Storing things "in the cloud" means, I'm taking things to re-use-it shops or bringing it in early July to our neighborhood yard sale.   And someday, if I ever need more wine bottle stoppers, I can just go to a yard sale or a thrift shop and get what I need then.  

A cupboard for the
well-hydrated family.

It's so tempting to hang onto things because they might be useful.  The vast collection of water bottles we've corralled into a cupboard of their own is one such example.  But close inspection of these babies, as I quiz them under the "do I really want to . . . " trifecta of questions, shows that (a) quite a few of these don't have appropriate lids, so they're not that useful after all and (b) they'd be even MORE useful if they were actually in the home of someone who used them, instead of sitting in the bottom of a cupboard waiting for a disorganized teenager to come along with a water bottle urgency.  

So into the cloud these water bottles go, if they're still working.  

Spray paint that may or may not spray.  

Cupboards upon cupboards of forgotten treasures.  My painting projects have reacquainted me with a surprising (to me) collection of spray paint.  When did I get all of these cans and colors?  They demonstrate that storing something that might be useful doesn't just delay their usefulness, but can paradoxically reverse their usefulness:  I should have put a bunch of these "in the cloud" when they were new, because now about half of these are caked up and won't work.  Even though I could imagine doing fun projects with the rest of the spray paint, I'm going to opt for the cloud instead of some unspecified corner of the next basement as the best place for these to go.  

It's hard even to call this "decluttering", because this stuff is well-organized and not particularly clutter-y.  It's possible that shoehorning it all into a smaller home might make the quantity seem larger and more overwhelming . . . but even without that, I'm glad to be moving these things out of the closets where they've lingered.   So many things to set free.  77 days to go.