I'm in!
I know I have pack rat tendencies and the small city apartment my husband and I rent is currently a disaster with just piles of things everywhere. We've been saying for a while now that "we're working on it" and maybe we have but not hard enough to really see progress.
Last February my family moved my grandparents out of their home into a retirement building. We had all joked for years about my grandmother being a hoarder, well … turns out it wasn't much of a joke. The clean up process was massive and now almost a year later, everything has been sorted, disposed of, boxed up, etc. We still have no clue what to do with a large amount of her "treasures" but after this experience I think we are all VERY ready to downsize and truly look at our belongings and decide what do we actually need.
In our city there is a trading facebook group that I try to use pretty often to get rid of things. I normally trade for household consumables ( dish soap, toilet paper, etc) but people can be flaky and not end up following thru to take the items. I think I just need to wrap my head that as much as someone may still find use in the item, I need to let it go and allow them to find it at a donation/resale retailer, rather than waiting it out to receive some benefit from the item.
My husband has this week off work and yesterday started to go through clothes (
) and managed to pack up 2 very garbage bags to throw out and he's just scratching the surface. The number of worn out socks, band t-shirts and ripped jeans he was finding in the closet and drawers was wild! He still has clothes from his early years at college ( 2007?) and its time for them to go!
It sounds like a large number but I am going to put it out there that we're aiming to declutter 400 items and I would roughly guess his garbage bags had at least 50 items (I am sure there was more but 50 seems like a reasonable guess).
so! 50/400