Goodbye Junk Challenge!

As you may (or may not) remember, one of my New Year's resolutions was to become more organized. Happily, while browsing Twitter, I crossed paths with Shell, who blogs at Percolating Practice. Shell had the wonderful idea to say goodbye to all the junk in her house, a little bit at a time. The thought was to tackle the junk in your house in small pieces, rather than wait until it overwhelms you. Find one thing per day and decide what to do with it: find it a permanent place in your home, donate it, or throw it away. Great! Just what I needed! A plan and a group of folks to hold me accountable.

I'm not always able to do the "one thing a day," so I'll often try to perform a bigger purge on the weekend instead. This is my first check-in post, but it actually covers about three weeks.

Big Garage Clean-Up

Carey and I sorted through our stuff, organized the bins of baby clothes into an easier-to-access order, and made a huge pile of stuff to donate. The donation pile included some children's toys that were duplicates of toys that Abby already has, as well as some light fixtures and window shades that we had replaced, but which were still in good condition. Carey took small loads to the Salvation Army Thrift Shop in our town, and on the Friday before Labor Day, the Salvation Army came to our house to pick up a working, but old, refrigerator. (Our house was originally set up as mother-daughter apartments, so we had a full kitchen upstairs and another full kitchen downstairs. I'd like to turn the downstairs kitchen area in to Abby's playroom, so we decided to donate the old fridge, which had been sitting in our garage since we moved into the house in June 2008.) We still have a few more things that we're going to try to sell (including some baby items), but if they don't sell, I'd be happy to donate those to Salvation Army, too.

Linen Closet Clean-Up

As I mentioned above, I'm hoping to turn our downstairs kitchen into Abby's playroom. While this will free up space in our living room and family room (by consolidating all of Abby's toys into one place), we will be losing quite a bit of storage space. Right now, I'm using the kitchen cabinets to store everything from extra pantry items to Christmas decorations to tools. Knowing that I'll be losing this storage space has encouraged me to make sure that I'm using the space I do have to its best advantage. Case in point: my linen closet. Stuff was fairly easy to find, but it was very spread out and I often forgot what exactly I had in there. So, I pulled everything off the shelves and created three piles: find a new place for it (far right pile), throw it away (center pile), and donate it (far left pile). Most of the items in the "throw away" pile were there because they had expired. Most of the items in our "donate" pile were candle holders and travel-sized toiletries. (Our church actually collects travel-sized toiletries to give away to the homeless in our area, so we know they'll be put to good use.) What does my linen closet look like now?

Plenty to room to store extra Kleenexes and toilet paper, which are two things that take up a lot of cabinet space downstairs.

Return of Deposit Bottles

In New York State, all carbonated beverages, whether in cans or bottles, have a 5 cent deposit charged on each container. The hope is that consumers will save and return the bottles for recycling, in order to get their money back. Recently, NYS added a deposit to plastic water bottles. Well, I'm more of a Brita pitcher gal myself, but Carey's mom has several co-workers who asked her if she wanted bottles for deposit. Mama (my mother-in-law) doesn't have the time to return these to the store, but she told Carey and I that she'd bring them over to our house if we would deposit them. Why not? It's free money, right? Well, after going through the gigantic garbage bags of bottles and cans that we had on our back porch, Carey returned them to a whopping $9.45! That's right - in one shot, Carey returned almost 200 bottles and cans for deposit. Our deck is looking much neater, too!

Selling Textbooks on Half.com

This was something that I'd done right after Carey and I got married, but I hadn't posted anything in a few years. Half.com is the part of eBay that deals with books, textbooks, DVDs, etc. You can post your old items and, for a small commission, Half.com handles the selling of those items. You're required to submit a description of your item and the seller is responsible for actually mailing the packages to the buyer, but any sales that I make are deposited in my checking account automatically twice per month. I sorted through my bookshelves (in our office upstairs and the family room downstairs) and came up with about 35 books that I wanted to get rid of. Many of them were books that I'd been required to read for graduate school, I was hoping that someone else might need them! Since I posted my books about 10 days ago, I've sold 12 books for a total of $99.67. Shipping cost me approximately 3.25 per book, and I spent about $15 at Staples for mailing supplies for 24 books. So, as of today, I'm up about $50, which is going toward a new camera fund that my husband and I have started. I also had two additional sales today, so I expect to see about $12 go into my pocket.

So, that's the "junk" that I've dealt with over the past few weeks. Interested in joining in the challenge? It's not too late - just hop over to Shell's website for details and helpful tips. (Also, if you're on Twitter, search for the #GoodByeJunk hashtag - lots of people post successes and suggestions on Twitter.) On tap for this week/weekend - the office. (Insert ominous noise here...)