Salutations™!!

We have friends, the Joneses, that just finished their 40 bags in 40 days decluttering project. They had to faithfully get rid of at least a bag (no matter the size) each day for 40 days and that helps get rid of a bunch of crap. They did really well.

Just the thought of that turns my stomach. I’m not a hoarder or pack-rat, not really. I do collect stuff but only the few things that I like. But, that’s not what I’m writing about. The BCPF and I have, in the past, gone through parts of our kitchen and cleared and cleaned things we didn’t need/want any longer. We decided on Friday to pick up where we had left off about eight months ago (yeah, we drag it out). This experiment continued and our fodder for this leg was our glasses and cups cupboards. We have three cabinets for that. One’s a display case, one’s got all of our regular glasses (pint, wine, drinking, etc.) and the last has a shload of coffee mugs.

We started in the everyday cupboard and cleared it of all of its contents. Whilst we do want to entertain, we don’t foresee any scenario where we’ll need 20 plus, assorted sized wine glasses and 15 pint (read: bar shaker) glasses that have beer names like Coors Light, Miller Light and a deep blue Labatt Blue glass plus other never-used glasses cluttering up the cupboard. So, we decide to only keep 6 smaller wine glasses of like kind (all from former Official Wine Sponsor of The Less Desirables, Barnhills) and four larger wine glasses that came in a set. We also kept six pint glasses and six 12-oz glasses that have Marriott and something else on but they’re really easy to drink beer from. We kept two regular drinking glasses and a few of the taster size glasses. We don’t really use glasses to drink from at home as we have tumblers that we use for that. We kept those. The rest of that was a matter of wrapping and boxing.

While that was being sorted through, I emptied the display case. I was once in the Beer Glass Collector’s Club in which I got two international beer glasses per month, along with a certificate and description of the beer. I was in that for ten months. So I have 20 of them. I also, over the years, collected Warsteiner pilsner glasses, two Beck’s giant mugs/stein, and 8 tall wheat/pilsner styled glasses. Also, I had six sherry glasses and six port wine glasses. The proximity of this cabinet to the stove had, over the years, created a lot of grime and gunk on the glasses. The ones that had etchings I put in the dishwasher, the ones with paintings, while I believe them to be safe, we handwashed. The end result were some fantastically sparkling glasses. So, I rearranged them to look nice, leaving the Warsteiner glasses in there and moved the Becks steins to the main glasses cabinet which were placed behind the normal drinking tumblers. We continued to wrap along the way.

The mug cupboard was last and pulling everything out, we had around 30 coffee mugs. I do drink tea and sometimes decaf coffee, but we couldn’t, again, think of a scenario where we needed that many coffee mugs. So, we each picked about six or seven that we felt a connection to (The BCPF likes to get mugs from places we visit) or liked especially. We paired it down tremendously.

So we finished wrapping all the glasses and mugs that we decided not to have in the house. I then went out to our out building to see about a place to put them. Yeah…  I went back in the house and said to The BCPF, “you know, Goodwill is looking like a great home for all of this.” She said that’s true but I don’t think she thought I’d go through with it. I loaded up Nigel (the Kia Soul) with six boxes of glasses (I told you we had a lot) and drove it to Goodwill. They acted like they didn’t want them at first and then came out and said, okay, we’ll unload them. We came back and did a few more piddling things around the kitchen and dining room area (they’re the same). I then went through our newly growing record collection and I put all the used together and the stuff we’ve gotten new in another spot, for now.

Saturday we to up and went downtown to get our hair cut, stopped by the store and came back to sweep and mop the floor. We felt good about it and asked our friend Jim to go to dinner with us and then come home and shoot the breeze with a few beers. Combined with the bathroom that 3B and I cleaned thoroughly on Thursday, the weekend felt very productive and we were glad to have company. We think we can get to a point to have others over soon. We like that idea. We know just the people to invite, too. That’s another story, altogether.

Anywhat! It really is a relief and pleasure to have a freshly cleaned living area and when we left and came home or this morning when we came downstairs, it was awesome to come to that clean space. So rewarding. Now, we have come up with a maintenance plan to keep it this way. We’re so busy but there must be a way. What secrets or techniques do you use to enure your house stays presentable or just clean enough to make you happy? We’d love to hear.

Until tomorrow, same blog channel…
Scorp out!

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“When we clear the physical clutter from our lives, we literally make way for inspiration and ‘good, orderly direction’ to enter.” – Julia Cameron