Take that, Hell

Slowly but surely, we are regaining the use of our dining room table. Once covered with most of the remnants from The Corner from Hell (and it's adjoining closet), about 2/3 of the table now is uncovered and able to be used. Today was a big day - I went through the second half of the closet, getting rid of anything we weren't keeping, and then was finally able to put things back in the closet that will be living there permanently - mainly Christmas tree, ornaments, lights, and then the various items needed for gift wrapping. My baseball cards also went back in there temporarily (turns out I have two full storage crates and one large box of baseball cards), but I've given myself until the end of this month to start the process of getting rid of those. We still have to go through the shelves of the closet, and the bookshelf that resides in that corner - but The Corner from Hell has been largely subdued. At this point, it's more like The Corner from That-Time-You-Had-a-Cold-That-Gave-You-an-Annoying-Throat-Tickle - noticeable, but nothing near life-threatening.

So what went today? Mainly trash. We apparently love trash - we're the Oscar the Grouch's of the homeowners world. There were torn gift bags full of unusable tissue paper, a bunch of gift boxes that were bent and ripped, and a ton of CD's. We're in step one of a two step process when it comes to CD's - for now, we are getting rid of all our jewel cases. Everything is going in large CD sleeves, and then later we're digitizing all the songs/discs we want to keep. We took care of about 200 CD cases back in March, and took care of another 100 today. When all was said and done, here's the outgoing trash:

And then there are the non-trash items. The big item we donated this time was my Playstation 2... and the three pounds of dust that had collected on it in the two years since I last played with it. Turns out I like to play with my Wii much more, and so does Lauren (hey, people, get your minds out of the gutter - this is a family blog...). Along with it went 6 controllers, a "Pump it Up" mat, and about 25 games. We also donated a few pictures, some baskets, and some Christmas decorations we only used once or twice. Here's the loot you can get from our local Salvation Army sometime next week:

While doing all of this cleaning, we've even managed to clean off one of our bookshelves pretty well - here's the "before" (if, by before, I mean "after the first time we cleaned it") and after:

Holy Flurking Schnit! We cleaned it so well that it became invisible! That's amazing - I cannot believe how well we cleaned that... oh, wait - I forgot. We cleaned the bookshelf off and then donated it, too. As of this morning, we had three bookshelves in our dining room. Now we have two, and by the end of the month we plan to be down to one bookshelf. The bookshelf from The Corner from That-Time-You-Had-a-Cold-That-Gave-You-an-Annoying-Throat-Tickle will be donated once we finish going through it's contents as well. We decided that having those three bookshelves is just enabling us to keep more crap around that we don't need and that is not giving us joy - so why not give us two less bookshelves to dust? You know, for that one time a year when we dust...

It's been a good, long evening of cleaning, and it's amazing how I can be simultaneously exhausted from cleaning and looking forward to getting some more cleaning done. I was recently asked by a friend how much of our house we felt like had been transformed by this project, and I told him while I would say over 50% of our house is in a less cluttered state, the real transformation has been in how we think of things. We don't need all these shelves and boxes of "stuff" to remember all these times we've shared together - because we have each other. Keeping things around wasn't giving us joy, it was giving us more things to clean and take care of (or lose track of) when we could be using that time to have new experiences together. And now we even look forward to getting rid of stuff and bettering our lives, because we're learning more and more how making our house simpler is giving us so much more in terms of comfort and piece of mind. So, while I love being able to look around and see a noticeable improvement in our house, I love even more being able to feel a noticeable improvement in our lives.

And, since it's after midnight, I'll wish a happy first birthday to our favorite little boy in the whole world. Happy birthday Sorin! We love you!