A tale of two wash rags

Did I mention we're down-sizing further?  We are.  

This time we're down-sizing a LOT.  The last time we moved, it looked on paper like a massive down-sizing: we went from a many-bedroomed house with a large yard and a 2-car garage to a 2.5-bedroom row house with no yard and street parking.   

But then, it was easy to give away things by categories.  Basically, stuff that had belonged to the children went away, either to the children or into "the cloud" (thrift shops, freecycle). Similarly, yard stuff disappeared from our lives.  

This time, on paper it looks like not as big a change.  But that's because on paper, the square footage listed for our row home doesn't count our current basement, nor hallways.  It doesn't count storage closets.  And this time, as we move into a condo, we're reducing our living space by a something like 30%, but we're giving up essentially ALL of the basement/back porch storage spaces. 

And that means we have to think about every little thing: where is it going to go?

We have to think about big things, too, of course.  But this particular post is about how all those tiny little things seem to really add up.  As a particular example, these two wash rags have been dogging me.

One of these is a wash cloth that's part of a towel set my husband brought into the marriage nearly three decades ago.  He still uses the towels (which I've patched once or twice, even; he likes the towels that much).  But he doesn't use wash cloths, so this particular one just keeps moving from linen closet to linen closet as we move.  Now that we won't have a linen closet, what do we do with it?  Do we continue to store it even though we don't use it (because it matches his towel)? We could certainly use that storage space for something we do use. 

The other wash rag is a Captain America one we got for one of my sons at some yard sale. My sons flew the coop without it, and so I've stored it in the "Super Hero Dinner" box, but never actually used it at one of our family Super Hero dinners.  

Neither wash rag is in particularly awesome shape. If we don't keep them, where do they go?

Clearly, deciding what to do with two washrags is not a momentous decision. I merely photographed these because they are emblematic examples of the many, many tiny little decisions that we're making as we think about what to keep and what to try to get rid of responsibly. 

I really want our new smaller space to not feel cluttered, and I know that means jettisoning much of what we have. At the same time, I want this new space to be livable, and that means having necessary supplies on hand. So, all of these tiny little decisions accumulate.

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(Just in case you're wondering, we're putting the larger washrag into our "Free" box, and I'm going to put the Captain America washrag in with our kitchen dish rags, because I think it will be funny to use it in the new kitchen.)