We’re down to Holy Week and I haven’t done a total clean sweep of all the hidden places in our home, but I have found stuff I didn’t know we still had and put them in 3 categories: 1. KIDS’ STUFF: * How many puzzles should one home have for a rainy day? Probably a […]
Living Lightly
Susan Vogt on living more simply but abundantlyBrowsing Posts tagged Memorabilia
Basements and Garages are natural storage places so this is the likely place to find a lot of things to give away. It’s also likely to take a lot of time to sort through stuff accumulated – possibly over decades if you haven’t moved recently. There are 3 basic kinds of storage items: 1. Seasonal […]
The past 10 days have included a trip to urgent care, 3 days of company, and a weekend of contra dancing so I pruned my finely tuned schedule instead of stuff. Fortunately 2 of those days were Sundays and the rooms didn’t contain a lot of stuff to give away. LIVING ROOM: Since our furniture […]
BEDROOM #3 (Click on photos to enlarge) Days 10, 11, 12 I thought this bedroom would be easy because I knew I dare not remove any of our daughter’s memorabilia. It hasn’t really been her bedroom since she graduated from college, almost 20 years ago, BUT she had personalized it by painting murals and sayings […]
We’re 9 days into Lent (not counting Sundays) which means according to my master plan I should have spent 4 days pruning our Master Bedroom, 4 days pruning Bedroom #2, and 1 day pruning the upstairs Bathroom. I’m one day behind (the bathroom), but who’s counting. I know curious minds want to know how it’s […]
Before I reveal what “BVG” means, I’d like to share a letter to my grandchild. See if you can guess the BVG. Dear grandchild, Once upon a time, a long time ago, BVG, you may wonder what families did for fun. In my own family we played GAMES. Lots of them were board games. We […]
HANGING ON: It was just one leaf – but it kept hanging on. That’s what I thought as I looked outside my bedroom window from Nov. 21 to Dec. 5. As I sat in my prayer space during those two weeks, I kept pondering the spunk of this lonely leaf (see the middle of our […]
Now that one office file cabinet is pretty much pruned and reorganized, I decided to tackle my two bookcases which hold work related books. I had a happy conundrum. Friends who were moving out of town offered me one of their bookcases. It matched my main bookcase in size and style so I was happy […]
I’m in a time warp. Easter was over 2 weeks ago but I’m still finishing up my Lenten resolve to prune my file cabinets. By Easter I had pruned 2 drawers of my first cabinet. (See here ) Once started, I was motivated to keep going. I have now finished the final 2 drawers of […]
Lent is over but my Lenten resolve is not. I had 2 goals: TO CLEAR MY MIND OF THE POLITICAL FUNK that was crowding my spirit by trying to better understand those who have different political beliefs than mine and voted for Trump. I spent a lot of time during most of Lent conversing with […]
A success I couldn’t fit anything more into the file cabinet drawer assigned to NACFLM, my professional family life association. At this same time, a NACFLM committee I was on decided to archive former newsletters. For many years I had been the newsletter editor. Hmmm. I decided to bite the bullet and go through all […]
As we approach the season of Thanksgiving and Gift Giving, my mind turns to how to be generous. What is truly helpful vs. what just adds to another’s clutter, feeds an addiction, or stresses the environment. First, let me say that it is possible to overthink this generosity thing. At its core generosity is about […]
Following my mother’s death last spring, I was blessed with inheriting quite a few lovely items. This presented me with a mini dilemma. Here I am trying to prune my home of extra possessions but I want to honor the memory of my mother. By including some of her household items in my decor I […]
Now on to the really hard core homeless items. My top 3 are Mattresses. (I never did find any place that would take a mattress so I re-purposed the baby crib rails and metal as garden supports and put the mattress on the floor for visiting kids.) See mattress posts here and here. Items that are […]
Lent is about to start again and I’ve got two ideas for Lenten practices. Help me decide. 1. Don’t buy anything during Lent. I wonder if this discipline would bring me into greater solidarity with those who may not have money for the basics much less any extras. Of course there would need to be […]
Jim and I have had the opportunity to travel to a number of foreign countries. Sometimes it has been to visit our children who were doing international work and sometimes it was for international organizations we belong to. In the course of our travels we’ve collected quite a few interesting artifacts and mementos. It has […]
I’m not sure if I made much progress this week. I finished Bedroom #1 but one of the drawers took me a couple hours to go through. I had forgotten that this was where I stashed old diaries and calendars dating back to my college graduation in 1969. Eventually I decided to keep them since […]
I’m still in my bedroom because we have two extra dressers that serve as storage for gifts, mementos, and children’s clothes that we still have visions of someday passing on to grandchildren. It’s a little embarrassing to admit that I have two dressers worth of extra stuff and a bedroom big enough to hold them. […]
For those who read last week’s blog and wondered what miscellaneous “adult stuff” I would be giving away, I’m afraid it’s rather boring – but boring with a lesson. Now that I’ve gotten rid of the kids, here are some miscellaneous parent contributions: 2 homemade pew banners from our kid’s First Communions. Now really, by […]
Yesterday, I sent out my periodic email Blog Alert to friends. I do this every 2 or 3 months so as not to pester people. (Not everyone checks my blog compulsively every day 😕 ) Since I’ve recently changed my email to a Gmail address, I decided to use Gmail for this bulk mailing for the […]
