The Purge: The Beginning

Spring has snuck up on me again and, with it, the desire to get some spring cleaning done, and a bunch of stuff out my apartment at the same time.

I'm not afraid to admit I have a little...erm...thrift store habit. And by little, I mean more like a big ginormous one. I really like an awful lot of things that the thriftstore tends to have a lot of - vintage dishes, linens, cookbooks, craft supplies, novels, costume jewelery - and I really like the prices that they have too. There are photos of a bunch of my finds in the works, now that there's some natural light coming in after a very grey winter but, suffice it to say, I have a lot of stuff around.

I'm also not afraid to admit that I have a lot of interests. I cook a lot, knit a reasonable amount and crochet a bit, read, write, sew, exercise, run, dance. I'm trying to learn how to draw and paint a bit as well. In addition, I do the vast majority of my work here, since my campus office is not so great. As a result, I have a lot of stuff.

This isn't a blame game - it's all my stuff, and I take ownership of it, often quite proudly. But I'm not so proud of the sheer amount of it sometimes, and the fact that although my apartment is never in a shambles, it is frequently in some kind of disarray, and it's difficult to clean because of the amount of stuff that I have, especially in the limited amount of time that I have.

So, I'm on a bigger mission than spring cleaning this year. I'm purging since I haven't purged in...well, a while, I suppose. I can't actually remember, which is not such a good sign. Although there have been little purges here and there along the way, I'm aiming high this time.

How high?

I don't really know yet. Thus far I have two boxes, three large garbage bags, and five medium sized bags, plus a full bundle buggy (yes, the bundle buggy goes too), and a dressmaker's dummy (which still leaves me with two more of them - oops.) Other than the fact that the piles of stuff further increase the difficulty of cleaning up, I'm pretty proud of myself for what I've accomplished thus far. But it's not done yet. There's a lot more left to do, a lot more left to simplify, and I'm hoping that posting about it here occasionally will keep me noth motivated and accountable to finally get rid of a bunch of the stuff that's cluttering up my apartment and weighing me down.