Crap Hoarders

My closet made me cry. We just got back from Belize and after living in a 3rd world country for a month, you learn to appreciate what you have and realize how much you waste. The day started simply, I was going to go through my closet and donate items to a local homeless women's shelter. I started going through the racks of clothes and then realized that some of the clothes i'd only worn once or twice. Some still had tags on!! That sent me over the edge...i started boo-hooing, realizing how wasteful we'd been. After I got myself together, I started pulling out clothes. Not a couple of shirts, or pants but after I'd finished I filled my entire car up and wasn't able to see out of the window...(Embarrasing).

We have a bunch of crap. Not keepsakes, not memories, not stuff...just crap. We have just spent the last several weeks trying to "de-crap" our lives in preparation for our move. You would not believe how hard it is to plow thru years and years of stuff. We had so much stuff that needed shredding that we decided to build a bonfire in our fire pit outside and burn everything!!! Its not just the papers but the books, the pictures, the clothes, the knick-nacks, ugh! Finally, we decided the best thing to do donate, donate, donate. We have taken car loads of clothes, books, textbooks and furniture to anywhere that needed it. To date, we have donated to Goodwill, Big Brothers/Big Sisters, Central Arizona Homeless Shelter and the Salvation Army. We didn't want anything to go to waste. I have to admit, it felt good to know that our stuff was going to be used and appreciated.

knee deep in packing crap

office CRAP!

We noticed that we had so much stuff in our office that we've collected over the past 20+ years that we couldn't just shread it all...in fact, we almost killed the poor shread machine. We even looked into have a shreadding company come by to pick up a big ol load (too expensive!!). After staring at piles and piles of sensitive documents for days, we decided to BURN IT ALL!

So we dumped everything into our outdoor firepit (took four trips in a big trash can) and we lit it UP!

Post burn....the ashes of  our lives :)

The next item on the list: Craig's List. I've used it before for a couple of things but I didn't know who some people look at Craig's List like a crack head stares at a pipe! I took a couple of pics of our washer and dryer. I love my washer and dryer. Its pretty, energy efficient and does a damn good job. But, alas, we can't take any appliances or electronics to NZ because of the expense and differences in voltage. So I posted my washer and dryer on Craig's List at about 12noon...I received three phone calls by 2pm! By 5pm I had a family over to take a look at the set! We ended up selling it to the second person that viewed it. That same day, I took pictures of everything from our kitchen table to my purse!!!!

This is important...to sell all of this stuff. We have 3 appointments with international movers next week and I would be so happy if they gave us the ultimate mover's compliment..."you sure don't have a lot of stuff!"

Keep your fingers crossed...