I've got some serious issues with clutter. This is the thing, I have serious issues throwing stuff away. I mean I can throw things away, like food packaging and old receipts and junk mail, but about the time when Exeter (NH) started their pay per bag system I started to realize that the world's resources were finite and that we should reuse and reclycle everything possible. That said I started to keep alot more things than I did before, the number of my trash bags went down and I felt OK about what I did throw out. But there are a lot of things you can't recycle, don't really have a use for, and they just kind of acumulate. Add to that a move to a house with ample storage for some kinds of things (a huge barn and a garage) and not sufficient storage for other kinds of things (food, toys, books and cooking tools), plus family and friends effectively dumping their stuff (broken tools, crooked bookshelves, cheap acrylic yarn, games we'll never play) on us I have reached the point where even I can not stand it. It wouldn't be so bad if my toddler would leave the stuff in it's place, but I came home last night to a whole box of books strewn all over the office. I've kept these books because they are my favorites. I have whittled and pared down the collection 'til it only fit in ONE box and I'd like to have them all stored neatly on a bookshelf I have yet to build in the hall. I haven't built the bookcase because the wall is wavy and it'll need a fair amount of recon before I can put square wood against it. We don't have the cash flow to facilitate such a renovation so the books sit in a box waiting for a bookshelf and get strewn when Mommy's not looking. This is just one tiny example oth the thousands of things I have in my house that are cluttering up my life. I know some things I truly want to get rid of, so much so tat I rounded them up to bring them to the swap shop at the local tranfer station only to find out that the selectmen have decided it's no longer a good idea to have such a place and have closed it indefinitely. I suppose there's always freecycle, but that takes so long to unload things - I couldn't even give my perfectly good leather couch away - that it's not even worth posting. A yard sale would be a monumental undertaking at this point. So what options do I have left? I can pitch the stuff as I come to it in my cleaning/clutterbusting endeavours, or I can put it in boxes as I come to it and see if someone could possible come by with a U-Haul and spirit it away, or I can pray for a house fire.
I don't know. It's just too much.
