The great purge

Every year we go through our condo and take inventory on what we own and clean everything... and by everything, I mean EVERYTHING. Every drawer, under the bed... behind the furniture.

We generally start in November when we haul out the Christmas decorations and we generally finish up in January by the end of the holidays.

We had finished most of the place in January, but we were having a hard time getting rid of the bags and some furniture pieces we had managed to pair down, so I held off posting about it because I felt like the job wasn't done until the items were gone.

Particularly the wooden hutch that we have had in our living room since January 11th. We had it shoved in front of our bookshelf near the kitchen so everything I wanted to watch a movie or a TV show on the computer and attempt to cook, I couldn't... because I couldn't see over the hutch in the kitchen... so it drove me CRAZY... but  NOW EVERYTHING IS GONE so I can FINALLY blog about it.

We took our old bar stools over to my mom's house to store for later... (along with the chest of drawers, pictured above).

We cleared out at least 5 garbage bags full of clothes, books, my old bedding set that SCB refuses to sleep on (too soft for him), our old bathroom hanging shelves and storage items from when we put the new cabinets in... SCB even parted with all his Yugo cards, dragons, and his play station (the video games, console, dragons, etc were sent to his brother in Oregon-- everything else we donated to our annual Relay For Life Garage Sale... which brought in over $1,000!!!)

We ended up emptying our wooden hutch at the foot of our bed and getting rid of it a few months ago. It didn't make it to the garage sale because we had no "corner" we could keep it in when we re-arranged the bedroom furniture... so it ended up getting pitched because it wouldn't fit in our cars to go down to Goodwill... (It's moments like this where we miss Wanda the hatchback and her amazing storage shoving capabilities.)

So how did we manage to get the wooden hutch out of our house 2 months later?

Hubs was driving the work truck back to the shop and hit a pile of traffic. The monster truck was empty and his boss had joked in the past about SCB just driving it home and then coming to the shop the next day in the truck to save gas and hourly pay for the company...

Knowing I had the drawers in the house... he called his boss and asked him if his boss just wanted to take SCB's car home that night. His boss lives 5 miles away from their work and normally drives the company truck home. SCB makes a point of keeping is car keys in his desk in case they ever need to move his car while he's gone.

Hubs pointed out that if he took the work truck home, they didn't have to pay him OT to sit in traffic just to  bring it back to the shop...  especially since we live on the way back to the shop and he could pick up a delivery on the way there the next day to save some time (and gas) since the warehouse was getting behind with deliveries and pick-ups. He may have also mentioned how we would love to be able to remove the furniture from the living room and take it the 5 miles to my mom's garage to store...

He agreed and I finally got the sucker gone. We took it to my mom's house because we want to get rid of the entire set together instead of piece by piece, especially because the rest of the set is immaculate and only the chest is kind of junky. So it might be a future craigslist item... or something we donate to next years charity garage sale.

Now that the chest is gone, my urge to purge has returned... which is good timing since this month we are working on getting new bedroom furniture, which naturally mean's i'll end up tossing out a whole lot more as we continue to re-organize our place.