This was the state of the spare room when I got that call.
And the rest of the house didn't look much better. I still had 2 giant, overflowing bins of Halloween decorations sitting in the middle of the living room, waiting for me to figure out how to get everything back in them. As well as all of the stuff my mother in law had dumped by the front door the last I-don't-know-how-many-times she cleaned out her car to make room for more stuff.
I had been ignoring the Christmas tree still standing in the den. As well as the boxes of my mother in law's
Every surface in the house was cluttered. Every. Surface.
I spent the entire weekend trying to figure out how in the hell I was going to get the spare room cleaned out so my sister, niece, and nephew would have somewhere to sleep. The garage was already loaded with bags and boxes of various items, much of which probably hadn't seen the light of day since my husband was a kid. The closets were (and still are) already stuffed to capacity. But I had to do it, there was no getting around that fact.
Well, what I needed first was storage space. The garage. It had been years since I even made an attempt to take a stab at the garage. The garage is the place where perfectly good items - that nobody needs because we-already-have-3-more-than-we-need-inside-the-house - went to die.
Okay, I might be exaggerating a tad bit.
So, Monday, I walked into the garage and looked around. Mystery trash bags of who-knows-what that no one even remembers putting in there. Boxes falling apart due to age and haphazard stacking. Totes full of unsorted mail. I started with the trash bags first.
I tried to just do one bag at a time, then take a break. But as I started seeing progress, I didn't want to stop. After a while though, I'd catch myself getting frustrated (especially sorting through the mail to make sure I didn't through out anything important), at which point I'd force myself to stop.
It actually took a week and a half to clear out enough space for the holiday decorations, and the rest of the junk, (more boxes, redundant furniture, etc) in the house. It was a lot of work, sorting trash, donation, and not-my-place-to-decide.
That Thursday night, my mother in law panicked when she saw how many bags of trash I put out. I knew she would. But I couldn't run the risk of missing trash pick up Friday morning. I assured her I only threw out my stuff, toys that were in no shape to be donated, and junk mail. I'm not sure she believed me, but she didn't go out there to check.
I was actually a tad surprised at how much of that stuff I had put in there. Toys and clothes mostly, probably intended for donation, then stashed out of sight when someone came over.
Yep, it's not just them. It's me, too.
