Trash night was last night. We added more crud to the giant barrel. Our city has large rolling trash barrels for residential pickup. In addition, we have a giant blue barrel for recycling, which is picked up every other week. It's a great program--we don't have to sort. Paper, plastic, glass, and metal cans are all included in the recyclables. We are diligent recyclers, so the barrel is usually quite full by the second week. One the other hand, the same-sized giant green barrel, which is picked up weekly, is almost never even halfway full. We compost food scraps. We don't buy fast food or use paper plates or paper napkins unless we're having a party. We simply don't generate much trash. However, I know the clutter lurking in the laundry room includes a fair amount of waste. We've held onto empty packaging from various electronics for years, just in case. We kept an old medicine cabinet, just in case. We kept the arms from an office chair that have collected dust for six years, just in case. Some people might need a dumpster to really declutter their homes. Since we are using baby steps to get the job done, we simply need to put more things that are trash in the giant empty trash barrel we already pay to have picked up weekly.
I admit, some of the screws, woods, wires, and other miscellaneous items we've kept have come in handy for this project or that emergency over the years. However, the bulk of the items sitting in the basement are waste. They waste our space. They waste our time, by preventing us from organizing the stuff we do need. They waste our energy when we need to move them repeatedly to get to the things we really want and need.
One of the biggest sources of clutter is partly used cans of paint. I must have 8 or 10 cans, some of which probably have about a cup of paint in them. Now that it seems we'll be getting a little break from the extended drought and heatwave, I'm hoping to do a few rounds of touch up painting to use up the last of what's in those cans and get them out of the house before the edges are too rusty to use.
The biggest blessing of the whole purging project is that Mike is finally on board, which has made the job much more manageable. For a long time, he took my requests to get rid of things as a personal affront--like I only wanted to get rid of his things. Something changed recently, though, and I'm not sure why or how. In any case, he knows it's not about him or his stuff. Now we're working together to make our little house meet our needs and keep our family comfortable.
The decluttering project is taking many weeks longer than I'd hoped, but it's getting done a little section at a time. We spend 30-60 minutes opening boxes and pulling out items. Some, we just toss. Others, we talk about and then decide together. We've tossed junk, donated useful items, and found new uses for dusty items we'd forgotten. We've done two or three rounds of sifting and sorting so far. I'm going to give it another round or two of purging before I post updated photos. The change is negligible to the untrained eye. In other words, if you never walked in our laundry dungeon, it would be hard to recognize the tremendous progress we've made.
The ultimate goal for the laundry room is to make it a multi-purpose space. One end will be a workout area with mats and weights. The middle section will be a pantry area and laundry section. The other end of the space will be storage. I'd also like to make better use of the "under the stairs" space so that it can be well-utilized for Christmas decorations, freeing up a bit more room in the storage section.
In addition to better defining spaces, we plan to paint the room to brighten it up. The room is so dark that it's hard to check clothing for stains, even with all of the lights on. Once some painting is done, I'll post more pictures of the transformation.
Good luck with the project!
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