Decluttering the Garage

If you have any issues with letting go of your stuff, this book, “Throw Out Fifty Things, Clear The Clutter, Find Your Life”, may just be the inspiration you are searching for.

I can attest to the fact that the more stuff you chuck, the easier it gets and the feeling of lightness and freedom is without parallel.

I have already gotten rid of way more than 50 items in the past 8 months or so, including lots of clothing, but the carnage continues at our house. The last frontier was the garage and here are some of the things going to a freecycler, Goodwill or the dump:

Scrap wood, 2×4’s, oak baseboard, old doors,
Some brass pots I don’t like any more,
A wire rack with hooks – I no longer have space for it since I purchased shelves for that area,
A window cleaning squeegee,
Some camping gear such as frying pans and a kettle,
My old skis and boots, which I have had for about 25 years (got my money’s worth from those!),
A shop vac that surfaced without a hose (my husband chucked the hose, thinking that the vacuum was already gone),
A sitz bath used briefly after delivering my first child 14 years ago (I know, too much information)!

There were also a number of items I “rescued” from other people’s garbage at one time or another, such as:

an old shopping cart to haul around my plein air stuff (never used it because the base from a big Peg Perego stroller works so well for pushing around my gear),

a small fan I was going to use in my studio to exhaust fumes (you could stick not just one but several fingers in there – dangerous!),

a nightstand I was going to use as a painting taboret (too short),

a bunch of hockey sticks and a golf bag in very rough shape (we kept some of the golf clubs so the kids can practice their swings),

tiki torches that are missing the metal wick part,

a tool box with broken clasps,

a couple of boxes of canning jars a friend gave us (I have not preserved anything for at least a couple of decades and I am not going to start now – I do like the wide mouth ones to store soup in the fridge, but these ones have a narrow mouth),

a bunch of so-so quality silk roses from my neighbour’s garage sale leftovers,

Rollerblades for my son that I spotted in front of someone’s house, destined for the garbage, but are useless because the brake cannot be replaced since the company no longer exists,

and an ugly, shiny brass framed mirror on a stand that I got from freecycle but turned out to be much too short for my purposes (for my painting studio so my subjects can watch me capture them on canvas).

This compulsion to save the world, by re-purposing or re-using items that other people callously send to the landfill, is a classic hoarding symptom. I have taken a new vow to avert my gaze whenever I spy something that I “could use” at the curb.

Anyhow, this book is seriously a really great resource and discusses getting rid of items from every part of the house, but also discusses eliminating emotional clutter too.