Decluttering Has Begun!

As it gets closer to our appointment with the consulate, it's easy to feel overwhelmed with all the things we need to get done before we leave.

It used to be that September seemed comfortably far away, but these days we feel a slight panic about all we need to accomplish in just 3 short months.

Yesterday we got a second wind though. This after a couple of weeks of "not thinking about Spain." The conditions were ripe to start looking through all the boxes we have stored in our closets. Even though we down sized a considerable amount last year when we sold our house, we still found many, many items to address before our trip.

To prevent overwhelm, we decided to go through the boxes in our house with these three categories in mind:

• store
• sell
• donate

This helped us stay on task and get through the boxes quickly. Wow, we felt so good after our 2 and 1/2 hours of decluttering. We filled almost half of our recycle bin and our trash bin with unwanted/undesired paperwork and items. We also set aside about 3 small boxes of items for garage sale.

But most of all, we found it felt so good to let go of the past and the empty boxes that were left made us feel so light!

I couldn't believe how much paperwork I had left from my old home and from my old jobs, talk about saving everything! And this is after 5 years of sorting through all the paperwork I've kept, too. Geez. We generate a lot of paper as humans, don't we?

The only bad news from yesterday's clearing and cleaning activity is that we may have overworked our little shredder. RIP little shredder, RIP.