Stuff

Lately I've been feeling exhausted and overwhelmed, not only because of work, although that contributes, or because I also have too many projects in various stages of completion, which of course doesn't help either, but because I have too much stuff to track and maintain and organize. I feel a strong desire to downsize, not so much in the direction of a smaller house, but in terms of unloading things that I don't want or use anymore.

Some of the stuff we have around the house is garbage. It's useless, not just to us, but to anyone really. Some of the things I have in my office are so dirty or water damaged or bug/mouse/creepything infested or stained by the leavings of those things that I don't even want to touch them. Motivating myself to go through those things, especially because I'll want to try to clean/repair/rescue some of those things is tough. The last thing I want to do after a long day at work, or even worse, on my weekend, is wrestle with giant spiders and dust mouse droppings off of something that had once been precious to me.

It's too dry to have a paperwork burning. That's one of my favorite forms of purging mess, is to sort through boxes or bags of paperwork that I didn't feel comfortable just chucking into the recycling bin. It's easy with no guilt and very little desire to retain/rescue individual pages, but it's time consuming. Anyway, since I can't really do my favorite garbage-ridding, I'm looking for ways to downsize the rest of our accumulation.

Donation is easy and convenient for those things we don't want or need anymore. We have a Goodwill station right by the grocery store. But I sometimes wonder if I might be able to get some actual cash money for some of our items.

Unfortunately, a lot of that non-useful-to-us stuff really needs to be cleaned up and organized, and then what? We're a bit too far out to have a garage sale. Ebay would require a big learning curve, and a friend of ours let us know that it can be quite time consuming without any guarantee of making back enough money to offset the time you spend on it, never mind get what the item is actually worth.

So, I'm debating what to tackle in what room, to what extent, and when, and while I debate, of course no progress is being made. Still, it's on my radar. I now that having less stuff will help reduce my stress level and give us less housework overall. When I look at homes that look nice, they tend to have very, very little clutter and almost no stuff in each given room. That would be full of awesome.

As long as I don't have to sacrifice any books. Clearly what we need are more bookshelves. Which technically are stuff, but ... not, right?

Ugh. Stuff. Too much stuff!