Purge purge purge! 248
No I don’t have an eating disorder. I have a hoarding problem. Well, not REALLY a hoarding problem like you would see on Hoarders or Hoarders Buried Alive… but still I feel like I have too much stuff and it would do some good to minimize it down.
Clothing is easy, yet difficult to minimize. This probably stems from my mother, who I think really is quite the hoarder. My mom has the biggest walk-in closet in the house with a closet organizer installed, plus the closet in my computer room, plus the closet in my dad’s room. Plus two stand-alone hanging bars, plus a coat rack, plus a big hand-carved Chinese chest-thing. Plus the insides of the drawers in a 9 piece bedroom set, plus all the horizontal space on top of the bedroom set, plus the top of that chest-thing, plus a patio table(?!) that for some reason is in the closet. That’s a lot of clothing.
The sort of irritating part about a lot of the clothes in all of these spaces? They’re mine. Generally t-shirts or sweat pants or gym shorts that I didn’t want to wear anymore. That my mom thought “was too good to just give away.” So she “rescued” them… to sleep in them, or do house work in them or whatever. So my mom still has shirts that I’d planned to give/donate away probably from 10 years ago. I swears, one of these days (when my mom isn’t home) I’m going to go through those clothes and grab what I know is mine to toss once & for all!
Anyways, the secret to this seems to be bag everything immediately, so my mom can’t go digging through piles of clothing. And I’ve had two garbage bin bags of clothes and one of shoes that have been sitting in the corner of the room marked for Clothesline (http://www.diabetes.ca/get-involved/supporting-us/clothesline/) to pick up for… probably a good 8-9 months.
I should have called earlier because some time last year they had a contest for a vacation to one lucky person who called in for a pick up, but never bothered calling. Although I found out last night they now have an online form to request a pick up, so hopefully I’ll get a call or e-mail back in a day or so telling me when they’ll be in the area next.
And I’m sure someone will be excited about the idea that I also sorted through my underwear drawer (and sock drawer… although that’s probably less exciting… unless you’re into that kind of thing) and have sorted out the ones as keepers from the ones I really should get rid of. The fun part about this is… it means the stuff I can get rid of, I can wear, then toss. I generally save these bits of clothing for the next time I go on vacation, because I just wear & toss while on vacation, and voila! Less dirty/smelly laundry to bring home!
In my random rummagings, I also found that I have a whole lot of prescription eyeglasses that I no longer wear… and I really should get rid of those too. So I googled around and found that Hakim Optical has a program for donated eye glasses (http://www.hakimoptical.ca/donate.html) so I’ve bagged up 5 or 6 pairs that I’ll have to drive around with until I find a store that’s open to drop them off. So now I should just have the glasses on my face, my previous pair (if I only knew where they were!) and one pair of prescription sunglasses I just found. And a few boxes of weekly contacts that I got a few years back… they’re still good I think.
This actually is quite exciting. I’m going to need to continue this & see where it leads me.
Because I really do think I have an obscene amount of stuff… even though when compared to most “normal” suburban people, I probably don’t.
