I've been working on decluttering my den for ages. I have a hard time letting go of pieces of paper sometimes and find it remarkably easy to acquire them. Articles from newspapers and magazines, letters and cards, notes and papers from college, concert programs, ephemera from trips.
Some things I'm organizing. All my correspondence is in hanging file folders with the correspondent's name on it. I also scanned a gigantic binder of letters for electronic storage. Items that I want to scrapbook I will also organize in folders.
Some things I'm dumping, such as saved articles. If I truly think I'll want them again, I'm either scanning the hard copy or finding it online.
You wouldn't think it would take a great deal of introspection to get rid of some of this, but sometimes it does. There are multiple reasons for this, but one major one is that if I get rid of articles on a topic I once researched in school, it's like saying I'm not that person anymore, I won't ever pursue anything scholarly again. But how insane is it to keep pieces of paper just as a badge that says I might write a scholarly paper sometime?
In the closet I have a small collection of Sports Illustrated magazines with Yankees-related covers. I collected them during the time in the late 90's when the team had such success. Now, I really feel ambivalent towards them. I still follow the team -- I guess I don't feel the need to keep as much memorabilia related to them.
We have storage cupboards in the living room. One of them is half-filled with records, as in LPs and 45s. We have a turntable, but it's not part of our current stereo setup. I can't remember the last time it was used. Over the weekend, husband was musing about whether we even needed our tape deck anymore. We should probably get rid of the turntable and the records, for sure. There's great "content" there, but we're never, ever going to take the time to digitize it. We're too lazy to even have the turntable set up. And our little kidlet could certainly use more storage space for her many toys and puzzles.
I guess watching Clean Sweep on TLC has infiltrated a bit, especially the concept that you should keep what's special to you, what's unique and irreplaceable, and get rid of things that don't have meaning and are keeping you from enjoying your living space.
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