365 Project - Day 58 - Enter At Your Own Risk

While Cadence and I spent the week in Arizona, visiting restaurants to write about for upcoming issues of WVHL magazine and hanging out with family, Steven was at home with Electra, working all day and then coming home to tackle the daunting task of trying to organize our basement.

God bless my anal retentive husband.

Most men left home alone for a week without their wives and children would spend their free time doing all the things they wouldn't normally be able to do--watching a lot of sports on TV, playing lots of video games, eating too much junk food and drinking too much beer, etc. While Steven does admit to sitting down and playing God of War for a 5-hour stretch, it was only after he'd already spent three days in the basement going through boxes and organizing.

When Steven was offered the job here in Nebraska back in November, we began packing immediately, because we knew it was going to be quite a chore. What we didn't realize was how much crap we had accumulated since moving to Arizona in 2007. Back then, we had enough stuff to fill an entire POD, and we thought that was a lot. Yet somehow, since that move, we managed to more than triple the amount of crap that we own.

 How did this happen? We've been asking ourselves the same question. The only logical explanation we've been able to come up with is that our stuff somehow managed to mate and reproduce without our knowledge, probably at night while we slept, or during the day while we were both busy at work.

We were packing right up to the moment we left Arizona. By then, it had become a panicked packing frenzy. We were either throwing things haphazardly into boxes, tossing them in the garbage, or giving them away to anyone who would take them. Even after a garage sale and a couple of trips to drop stuff off at the Salvation Army, we still managed to pack a 26-foot trailer from floor to ceiling.

We came to the conclusion then that we simply have too much stuff. In a previous 365 post, I wrote about hoarding, and wondered just how close we might be coming to crossing that very fine line. We have old toys and knick knacks from our childhoods, old magazines that we've already read, old clothes that no long fit, old pens that don't work, and a hundred other things that we probably don't even know about hiding in boxes. Here, in our rental house, we have neither the space, nor the desire to unpack all of our stuff. So, all those things that we simply don't want to deal with yet have been banished to the basement.

This past week, Steven did manage to go through some of his share and begin making piles of things to keep and things to get rid of. The rest of it, he stacked as neatly as he could in the two spare bedrooms and laundry room. One of these days, we plan to go through the rest of it and finally let go of some of this crap that we have been hanging onto. Until then, it sits, waiting patiently and taking up space.

Today's 365 Project is dedicated to all those things we hold onto. Our goal now is to get rid of some of ours. We'll keep you posted on how it goes.



Our collection of books, CD's, DVD's and magazines that fills an entire room.