The Great Purge

The Great Purge is something that we do every year. Typically, we look through every single item (and I do mean every single item), that is in our house and garage and make a decision to either keep it, donate it, recycle it, or throw it out.

The Great Purge is normally done once a year, but we haven't done one in about 3-4 years because all my previous free time was devoted to Evil Homework. If you think that The Great Purge is a mere afternoon's worth of work, you are sadly mistaken. The Great Purge take typically four full afternoons. This time around Saturdays in November have been devoted to The Great Purge.

Because we haven't done a proper purge in a few years, we have a lot of things to get rid of. I'm surprised at the amount of stuff we're getting rid of, especially if you've been to our house before, it ain't that big. Plus the fact that we need to make more room for the bebe, we are being less sentimental and more discriminatory when we make our decisions to keep or purge. Hubby's also managed to find a few things that he thought he'd lost or had thrown out.

So far so go, we're more than halfway through our house, although the piles of stuff is making it difficult to shuffle things around. Next week will be the kitchen, downstairs bathroom and the storage area. But the most difficult part (and this tends to be the most difficult part every time we do this) will actually be our two-drawer filing cabinet. There has been a constant debate in this household as to how much paper records to keep. Hubby wants to keep more, I want to keep less. Nonetheless, this particular part of The Great Purge, can cause marital discord if we don't set ground rules up first. And you'd never thought people would fight over a bunch of pieces of paper.

Anyways, wish us luck. I'm really hoping (crossing fingers) that we'd be done by next weekend, but history has shown that this is rarely the case.

(As a Public Service Announcement, I've found out that Future Shop actually take old CDs in for recycling. This is awesome news because when we went through our pile of media CDs (non-music, computer software CDs), we found about 50 or so that we had to throw out. Anything that we can recycle is better than throwing it in the land fill.)