Late last summer I started my
Four Weeks clutterbusting project. It soon became clear that I'd make time to clutter-bust or to write about it, but not both. I did make a lot of progress during those four weeks, but I abandoned this blog in the process. Oops.
Around the end of the four weeks, we decided to gut and renovate our basement, with just two weeks notice. I had just two weeks to
empty the basement, finalize the basement plan I'd been fantasizing about for years, and select every fixture and finish on a tiny budget. Two extremely busy but fun weeks, followed by months of the same as the walls came down and the basement was transformed (more on that someday!).
Imminent demolition was the ultimate de-cluttering incentive, and I purged a ton of stuff before storing the rest. Driven by necessity we emptied the basement completely, but much of the stuff that came out of the basement for the renovation had to go
somewhere else. We didn't just throw everything out (although we did purge
a lot!). Where did it go? Some got squeezed into the main floor of our house. The rest went into two storage containers. When the storage containers were emptied, we gave away a truck-load and the rest came back into the house. If there's an upside to moving stuff repeatedly, it's that eventually more and more gets given away.
To this point, this post has been a hurried attempt to summarize months of transition.
Bringing it up to the moment, this is what our bedroom, dining room, and office (formerly the
guest room) look like right now:
Boxes, boxes, everywhere. Let's see how much I can do with these boxes in the next two hours... I probably won't make much of a dent on the office, which needs some full-scale filing and organizing. My goal is to get all of the boxes out of the dining room and most of the boxes out of the bedroom, and to purge along the way.
