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Post by ohblondie on Sept 12, 2014 11:41:50 GMT -5
building golf course....getting cosmetic surgery.....PRICELESS!!!! Still chuckling!
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Post by hiding on Sept 20, 2014 13:26:06 GMT -5
I haven't talked about my purging week yet. I was so busy at working in the house. Then when I returned to my office Monday, I had a huge amount of work to catch up on and numerous meetings to attend. I will get to talking about it.
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Post by Unswamping on Sept 20, 2014 17:03:49 GMT -5
hiding glad you are back from your purging week. I hope all went well and you will fill us in on your progress. Sorry to hear about the return to work, vacations have a way of being that way. Hope youre caught up soon.
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Post by lostchild on Sept 20, 2014 17:05:05 GMT -5
I got a total count of four hundred covers to DVDs and CDs out. I am so happy. I am getting more stuff out than I expected and am still finding stuff to toss. I regret I didn't do this before!
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Post by hiding on Sept 21, 2014 16:44:44 GMT -5
Purging week was productive, educational, and not at all what I thought it would be. Although Sweetie and I put in, between us, a good 16-20 hours a day for 9 days, we only started to make a visible dent in the piles. I thought that in 9 days we would have everything cleaned up. Ha! Not even close. I way underestimated how long it will take. Again, I am expressing how grateful I am that we don’t have some entity breathing down our necks, forcing this purge. We are allowed to do it thoroughly and thoughtfully.
- Since I have always kept up with the trash on a daily basis, there wasn't nearly as much of that to toss as I had anticipated. I think, by far, the overwhelming percentage of our hoard is paper in one form or another. I think most of our time was spent going through paper! I vacuumed and dusted as I went along but I don’t know if that even counts.
- I threw away many books that were too damaged to donate or even put in recycling. I won't put moldy paper into paper recycling bins. There were other books good enough to donate and several others that were good enough for recycling. In my paper totals I am counting books as 1 piece of paper.
- I found a trick that made it less painful to get rid of books. If I had an inkling that I might want to replace a book, I added it to my wish list on half.com. If I really have to have a book again, I have the title author, and where to purchase it. Now, whether or not I will replace the tossed books remains to be seen. Regardless, adding them to a wish list made it tremendously easier to get rid of them.
- We found misc items, including clothes to donate. We delivered 4 big bags of salable donations to the thrift store. We also free-signed, in front of the house, several bulky space- consuming items. None of them were there very long. Oh, those all were items in good working order.
- I think that most importantly, we both view “things and stuff” differently now. Out thinking is shifting and I don’t think it will be as difficult from here on out. We have much more to do, but overcoming the inertia was probably the hardest part.
- Although hoarding is our personal responsibility it is affected by the legions of marketers who are devoted to folks continually buying more stuff. And that is even if we don’t need it or want it and even if it is low quality. We are all subject to their sneaky tricks. For us hoarders, yet another level of complexity is added to our problems.
There are two books that I highly recommend on the subject:
Overdressed : The Shockingly High Cost of Cheap Fashion by Elizabeth L. Cline Cheap : The High Cost of Discount Culture by Ellen Ruppel Shell
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Post by Arwen on Sept 21, 2014 17:18:24 GMT -5
Congrats on such productive week + extra weekend !!! I like your tip for letting books go more easily. I think I could probably relax into another wave of book donating using a wish list (or some kind of list anyway). It's like I've discovered something I might really like to read - haven't got to it yet in ten years but that's beside the point - and I don't want to lose the discovery. It's still a discovery if written on a well organized list. Arwen.
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