Purge

The other night after the kids went to sleep, I ran to the mall to look for fall clothes. In the 40-ish minutes I had before the place closed, all I could find was a pair of leopard-print stilettos, a filmy black blouse with a ruffled collar, and a black and white pinstripe blazer.

I liked plenty of other things, but for some reason, I couldn't imagine them living in my closet.

This morning, I almost cried reading the real estate section-- and not just because houses in our complex are about $50k less than they were when we bought ours. I was just so JEALOUS of all the houses with spare bedrooms and unfinished basements and you know-- room for STUFF. We have run out of stuff room.

After breakfast, Ben and I both cleaned out the covered baskets of crap that sit on our dressers. Inspired, I also cleaned out the two baskets that sit on my bookshelf/desk combo. On a whim, I opened the cabinet under my desk, the dusty place where my copies of Planned Parenthood's archive from 1942-1973 lives along with boxes and boxes of Walgreens photo orders that I place and pick up every week but can;t put in albums because I don't have any ROOM for albums.

Until the moment I opened the cabinet door, we planned to throw on some clothes and head out for some grocery shopping, maybe a walk by the lake and some lunch before cleaning the house from top to bottom, like we always do on Sundays. Instead, I started making piles of is-this-trash-or-treasure? and Ben swore under his breath, went downstairs to retrieve a box of garbage bags, and flung open the boys' super hero toybox.

We can never plan a whole-house purge because if we did, we'd never, ever do it because it sucks and is awful.

Harry and Jack were super good, milling around piles, watching TV, and finally going swimming with my brother for a few hours in the late afternoon.

Ben and I? Were AMAZING! Like, 3 carloads of donations amazing and a whole carload of trash that Ben took to my brother's apartment complex dumpster.

Look! You can actually walk in our closet again:

And I hung up all my scarves, which made me notice that they are all pink and purple. Now I have a specific item on my fall shopping list-- NOT pink or purple scarves

There's room again in the suer hero toy box AND in the stuffed animal toy box, which means we are finally able to build! more! bears!


Ben hung drywall hangers to reinforce the hooks in the kids' toy closet, and now we can hang their heavy stuff again

And he cleaned out and sorted all the tiny toys in the basket organizer thingy


We even have an empty toy shelf! We NEVER have empty toy shelves

We were so inspired by our upstairs success that we did the unthinkable and purged our garage and storage room, too.

Our laundry room is still a mess of discarded baby gear and shelves, but we can actually WALK INTO our storage room, and if we need to seek shelter in the event of a storm, we don't have to throw a bunch of shit into the laundry room first (which is good because all that flying debris would not be safe, probably)

I do feel guilty for wasting a gorgeous day inside when I could have been at the pool, but my closets are so clean I almost don't regret it. And now maybe I can binge on some fall clothes.