In my ongoing effort to prune no longer needed stuff from our home, my most recent purges included:
Kitchen Stuff – bowls, duplicate dishes, trays, lids… With fewer people living in our home now, we don’t need as many cooking supplies and storage containers, so I happily donated some extras to a local second hand shop Thrifting on Eastern. This thrift shop operated by the Brighton Center provides needed household items at affordable prices to people in need.
Personal Care Items – For several months we hosted two international students. It was exciting and mutually enlightening. At the end of their stay, however, there were a number of duplicate personal care items that they didn’t have room for in their luggage such as feminine hygiene products, slippers, toiletries (soaps, shampoo, make-up,) underwear, body scrubbies, extra T-shirts, etc. I gathered these and took them to Mary Magdalene House – a local facility that provides showers, laundry, and supplies to homeless people in the Cincinnati area.
Twin Beds – When our children were young we had a set of bunk beds for our two younger sons. As they grew older we morphed these into separate twin beds. This also worked well for hosting visitors after all our kids were sprung. However, times have changed and one of our grown children gifted us with a new Queen size bed to replace the twin beds. (Perhaps she felt this would also make her life more pleasant when she visited.😊) Anyway, the result was that we put the twin beds on Craig’s List (https://www.wikihow.com/Give-Stuff-Away-on-Craigslist) for free and were happy to pass them on to a local family in need who answered our ad.
These were not sacrificial donations for us since letting go of each of the above items simplified our life of stuff that was just taking up unnecessary space. It felt good to find new homes for things we no longer needed.
There are 2 categories of stuff, however, that are more difficult to part with:
* Sentimental items – my wedding dress and other specialized clothing, remembrances of special occasions, old school yearbooks, photo albums from before digitalizing was invented…
* Stuff our kids are still storing at our house because, “Hey, we might want those old school projects, childhood memorabilia, coin collections, etc. and you have the room to store them and we don’t.”
I leave these latter items for a future blog post. BUT… here are a couple questions for you now:
1. What stuff might still be hanging around your home that you no longer need?
2. How do you discern what sentimental items (family heirlooms, etc.) to keep and what to just take a photo of and discard?
