Well, so there it is - the final day. And actually, Sarah and I only went through part of her clothes; she still wants to do the rest of the drawers, so I'm sure there will be more stuff to go. Today's assortment is mostly Sarah's clothes - either things she doesn't wear, things which no longer fit or things which have holes (like the socks) - a few other t-shirts came downstairs to go in the pile to be cut for a future t-shirt quilt or to make a pillow from, or in one case, got donated to her brother (it's a Thor t-shirt; she really likes Thor, but it's bright red, so she never wears it. Alex has no such compunction).
Other items include a few shirts and cardigans from my own closet which for whatever reason I just don't wear, some pens, which either don't write (bin) or in the case of the green ones, will go to work as we do all our marking/commenting in green and I don't use them at home. A few candles/candle holders which I don't really use - two are brand new, so will go in the raffle prize bag. And a Bjork CD - Olivia put it on the other day to see what it was like and I realised I only really like one or two of the songs, so it can go to the charity shop.
This has been a fun experiment. I'm not really a hoarder in the first place, so I do tend to go through things fairly regularly to make sure we aren't accumulating stuff we don't need - when the kids were younger, we always had a big sort out of toys and games in the autumn before Christmas/birthday season, partly for practical reasons and partly to gently teach them the lesson about those less fortunate and make a point that we are lucky to be getting new toys, etc. It's a habit that endures - when there's no space to store something (a book, toy, game, CD, DVD, clothes, kitchen gadget, cookbook, whatever) in the place allocated for it, rather than put it somewhere else, we always have a sort out of the place and see what we can pass on. I'm sure if I had a bigger house I would have more stuff, but hopefully it would still be fairly streamlined so I didn't have loads of stuff I don't need.
I'll never be a minimalist, nor do I really want to be, but it's nice to know that the stuff is there because I've decided actively it's something I want, not because of inertia!
Will I do this again? Probably not formally - I imagine it will be years before I can find this many more items to get rid of - but the traditional Spring Cleaning, where you turn out all the cupboards - is a darn good idea, regardless of whether you do it in the Spring or some other time!
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