mini purging

An old purge picture

I was reading a post over at frugalwoods this morning and I realized that about this time during the year, we are completing "our annual purge." The purge typically begins when we pull out the Christmas decorations and as we start putting them away, we go from one area of the house to another in an epic sometimes 4-week adventure to do an entire house wide inventory of all of our belongings. The end result is a clean and de-cluttered home where we are only surrounded with the items that are useful and that bring us joy and happiness...

And we manage to eliminate the junk that has managed to creep into our home over the course of a year.

Every drawer, every closet, every nook and cranny gets emptied, wiped down and cleaned. We open every box, sort through items, shred paperwork and decide if something is worth keeping and storing in our limited space (we don't have a garage).

In past years we have had a bag or two of items we weren't sure about, so we have boxed them up and kept them until the next purge, where 9 times out of 10 they leave our home for the donation pile. What's really nice about living in a condo is that if we place items out by the dumpster, they are almost always claimed by someone else and avoid a landfill.

We ourselves have been the benefactors of dumpster drop-offs too. Toys for little man, fans that still work... even computer chairs if memory serves me correctly.

But the annual purge is here, and this year we AREN'T PURGING.

YUP, we won't be purging this year because we STILL aren't unpacked from the move completely and we don't have all of our storage built to open boxes and go through them (no built in entertainment center for the living room, or the final piece of our closet up and running...) and without these elements in place, purging isn't worth it this year.

Sure we will clean and re-arrange furniture as I paint our living room and kitchen, but just 6 months ago, we purged our belonging when we boxed everything up for the move...  and then what we did unpack, went through a second purge right there from the get-go. Having had most of our stuff in boxes for staging and then the move, really had us evaluating what we NEEDED on a day to day basis and a lot of stuff just didn't make the cut.

Since we aren't doing a BIG purge this year, I thought I'd highlight some of our other purging efforts in-case you all need some motivation to stay the course and do some of your own purging and deep cleaning: 

2013: January Purge Fest
2014: The Great Purge
2015: Annual Purge
(2016 we didn't blog the purge, but did it!)
2017: I thought we already purged...

We did recently purge our computer desk drawers of junk and unpacked 3 boxes! I tossed out some old foam squares I used for a workout mat that just weren't what I wanted (or long enough)... I found some 1.5 and 2.5 lb ankle weights, right as I was considering buying some light walking weights to hold on my treadmill (so I actually saved some cash by not buy something I already owned cause I can just hold these).

Hubs also has been copying all of our DVD's onto our plex server, so we can eliminate the cases and the physical copies... I finally tossed my entire CD collection, as these have been copied onto our computer and I-tunes for some time and to be honest, the only CD player in the entire house is in my car. (We also don't own a DVD player, so we'd have to copy movies to our PC or play them in our gaming consoles --which aren't unpacked yet... so the plex server is our best option).

I also found a few things to donate to a work event i'm doing... some old picture frames and some scrap booking materials I wasn't going to use.... I attempted scrapbooking last year and did a few pages, but I really like the photo books from shutterfly more, so I hope to scan in my movie tickets and just create a book instead to have in our home that documents the memories... plus I hate that my scrap book never lies flat because of all the stuff that's put in there... so I think i'm flying my white flag where scrap-booking is concerned.

SO a bit of a January Mini Purge... and hopefully by June well get caught up on all the house projects!

Happy Purging!