Cleaning Out Closets and Drawers. Oh My!

So, we’ve started a MAJOR spring cleaning effort, with our impending trip as the reward for this tedious hard work.

Who would’ve thought two people could accumulate so much stuff? We’ve only been in this house for about six years. And we’re making incredible finds in the backs of closets and bottoms of drawers. Admittedly, I ‘m a bit of a pack rat, and a lot of the accumulated crap is my fault. I also have to admit that it feels good to get rid of a lot of this stuff that’s just been sitting around for years. We’re throwing away, sorting stuff for donation and turning sales on Craig’s List and eBay into a fulltime job... Consuelo, with her mysterious need for organization, is turning cleaning house into a lucrative pastime. We decided to burn all of the music CDs into iTunes so we can enjoy via the ipod during our RV travels. By backing up iTunes onto an external hard drive and two separate computers, we feel comfortable selling the entire CD collection. Consuelo spent about 8 days straight working on this project (we had about 375 CDs!).

Although all of this has been a stressful ordeal in terms of the quantity of stuff we need to sort through, in some ways it’s been fun – kind of a reminiscent trip down memory lane: like when we discovered our old ski pants, the ones we wore more than 20 years ago, when we were learning how to ski in Germany… and we realized how tiny and cute we used to be and we laughed when it dawned on us why all those guys used to love to go skiing with us!

We’ve got the closet in the dining room done, the hallway coat closet almost done, the buffet in the dining room cleared out and the cabinet in the laundry room empty. And we’ve made a big dent in the library by moving many of the CDs –so there’s progress…We’ve still got the upstairs to do—closets and dressers (all those clothes… dreading that) and the basement – which will be the biggest, dirtiest part of the job… but we’ve agreed to wait ‘til the weather warms up a little bit – way too cold right now, bad enough that there’s cobwebs and dead crickets down there, we don’t want to deal with that in 30 degree temperatures!

Consuelo is starting to get a crazed look in her eyes.  I think she’s tired of all this - she muttered something today about missing her job! Ha, ha...