With a vengeance

I’m pretty good at paring my things down; I’ve never been much of a pack rat (although I was married to one in my first marriage). I’ve talked before about how many times I’ve moved over my life and I do think Kent is right—I constantly prune my belongings in anticipation of the next move.

But when Sal’s delivered our salvaged clothing and household items, Kent and I both knew it was time to be utterly ruthless. (Kent used to be a pretty good pack rat himself and decided seven moves ago he was done with that, so now he purges with the best of them.)

Before we could do the sorting and tossing, though, Kent had to make things safe for our cats—especially Wally. Sal’s delivered almost everything on hangers and covered with plastic bags like you’d see at the dry cleaners. Then the hangers had been rubber-banded together. Well Wally likes nothing better than to eat plastic bags and rubber bands, so Kent spent about 90 minutes just taking off the bags and the bands.

We spent yesterday going through over 20 linear feet of hanging belongings. We needed to determine which items just hadn’t been saved (most actually had) and after that the purging began in earnest. You can get a glimpse of the stuff we went through in the slideshow to the left. At one point our queen size bed was entirely covered to a depth of about 18 inches with items we were donating to Goodwill.

We also had to sort through our shoes. While we’d done a rough cut last fall, we needed to finish that chore up and it was not a lot of fun because at this point we had mostly ruined shoes left—and when I say ruined, I mean shoes with mold growing on them and stinking of mildew.

We did get one very nice surprise. We’d both written off our down booties as ruined just because they’re down-filled and we knew they’d been below the water line. I sure didn’t think they would have been salvageable. I opened up one of two boxes from Sal’s and there they were, all pristine and just waiting for us.

We filled the back seat and cargo area of my CR-V with items to donate to Goodwill. I'll probably find more things to donate but we made a lot of progress yesterday.

Edited to add that the quilts my mother made me look to be fine. So that's more great news. And also here's a picture of the cats after Kent did the plastic/rubber band removing exercise. Clearly they were worn out.