Clean Sweep

Hubby and I will be married 9 years in July! Holy cow! It is so hard to believe that 9 years has already come and gone.

Well, over 9 years of marriage, a couple can accumulate quite a bit of junk. Add a 2 year old to that equation, and you get twice as much junk! What happened to the days of simplicity? I honestly wish material things were not such a big deal any more. Isn't less, more? I sure do think so, and I've come to realize that Annabelle doesn't even play with three quarters of the toys she owns. Instead, she'd rather be right there next to Mommy cooking and cleaning dishes (i.e.: splashing water out of Mommy's sink onto her favorite prized kitchen cabinets).

And, we don't have the space to store all of our junk (since we live in an 1,100 square foot home), so this week I finally got in the mood to rid ourselves of some of this junk. Here is a picture of everything we donated to Goodwill today.

Of course, this picture does not really do our work justice, but it amounted to two full Ford Ranger truck loads hauled to Goodwill. We pulled many boxes down from the attic last night that we literally have not opened since May 2005. We trashed probably 3 container boxes (the size of the white box displayed in the photo) full of papers including college classroom notes and continuing professional education notes from many, many years ago.

For the 3-4 hours we spent last night sorting through these boxes, we consolidated our junk down from 12 boxes to only 3 boxes! And, hubby trashed and donated even more today after he sorted through all of his tools and handyman supplies.

Our attic is on its way to being more orderly. And, now, I can store some of Annabelle's toys in clear storage boxes upstairs in the attic so I can rotate her toys every 1-3 weeks. I have plans to take pictures of each toy and put them in a little photo album for her to pick her new toy for the week (or 2-3 weeks). Of course, we'll see how well that plan rolls out! I don't think she's going to get the option to pick the toy to go back up into the attic yet, but we will see.