I wrote about Döstädning back in 2017 and again in 2023. I also posted about “letting go” in 2023 and in 2024. In the months prior to moving last spring, we donated and sold many items. In the case of a couch in my son’s room, we actually had to pay someone to take that nasty thing away! After two decades in a home, we had accumulated items that simply were no longer relevant. Selling our house jolted us out of our inertia default, and we consciously redeployed items into society for better use.
Nevertheless, many irrelevant items STILL made it through the sieve into our new home. Thus, we continue to donate items to Goodwill, and I have posted “stuff” on Craigslist and eBay. I don’t know if we’ll stay in this house once the lease is up. If we don’t, we’ll probably just donate unsold items. No reason to move them, again!
We donated a lot of frames. Over the years, we accumulated frames for photos and various certificates. They mostly sat in the closet in our prior home. Then they sat in boxes in our current home for a few months. How silly! We pulled the photos out, and they will go into a folder or album. As to certificates, awards, degrees, licenses, etc., I reduced mine from a heavy box of frames to a readily available binder. If I forget that I’m admitted to Federal District Court or something, I can always double-check the binder!
One of the most interesting recent sales was our wine barrel. In our prior house, we had repurposed a wine barrel into small kitchen island. We fastened a glass top on it, and under the glass top we placed photos. It was pretty cool. Eventually, we replaced the island with a metal, high-top table, and the wine barrel was relegated to a corner behind the couch. We moved the barrel to our current home where we placed it once again in a corner. Why were we keeping this wine barrel? I put it up on Craigslist.
It turns out elsewhere in Tucson, a young couple’s pet birds had mated, and the mother was due to give birth imminently. They researched online that they needed to separate the male from the female and the hatchlings and that a wine barrel cut in half would make a good habitat for the male. They turned to Craigslist and found our wine barrel. How cool is that!?! I’m so glad they were able to repurpose it into something useful and that we no longer have an irrelevant object in our home.
Ironically, our current home is about twice the size of our prior home, and we have far less stuff! I think knowing that we’ll move out of here at some point is a good safeguard against reaccumulation.
With Love,
P. Gustav Mueller, author of The Present