Packing and Purging

Where do you begin?  What do you take with you? What do you keep? What do you toss?  I knew I didn’t want to take a lot with me.  My housing is completely furnished, thankfully!  I could either ship my stuff or take it with me on the plane.  The minimum to ship was 500 pounds!  I guess if I had a family or was taking furniture I would have that much, but there was no way I was going to have 500 pounds of stuff to take. Originally, I thought I would put my things in storage because my parent’s “storage unit” was full.  (They don’t really have a storage unit, but some space I have stored my life in before.) My parents decided that some of the things in the “storage unit” could be sold and I could store some of my belongings there.  This meant I really needed to purge lots!  A couple of weeks ago, I decided to see how much of my clothes would fit into my suitcases.  I had purged my closets a while back, but not nearly enough.  Apparently, when you have space you keep stuff you don’t really wear.  When I was done this time, I had eight bags of clothes to give away and that was just my closet!  Ack!  (Don’t judge, I used to work in retail.)  There will be more clothes (and shoes) to go to charity after tomorrow.

The real killer in all this was that I knew I needed to purge my books because there isn’t enough space for all my books in the storage space.  I easily have over 200 books.  Most archivists and librarians would balk at getting rid of them, but I wanted to make the decision about what to keep and not come home to my Mom having a book sale.  The key in this was making sure my Goodread’s list of books read were all up to date, so I would at least know what I had in my collection.  So far I have gone through most of the books and have only kept two boxes.  I still have books to go through so I imagine there will be one more box and three boxes was my goal!  And yes it hurts to give them away, but at least I know they are going to a good home.

Of course, lots of other things have gone in the trash.  Two dressers went to the curb today and were immediately taken.  My sister is taking some of the other furniture and some things are getting sold.  The lesson I have learned in all of this is that you should purge your stuff every year.  I could have saved myself tons of work!

PS. Thanks Mom for helping with the packing and purging.  And thanks to Dad who will come take down curtain rods in an apartment for me for probably the 100th time!