Too much stuff!

Matt and I have started to feel rather overwhelmed by the amount of stuff we own and have crammed into our humble abode. It could be worse I suppose, but then again it could be quite a bit better. It doesn't help that we live in a rather small place that tends to look cluttered very easily, making things appear perhaps worse than they are. Matt and I both have some pack rat tendencies, as well as a tendency to think "well, this might be useful someday" which is not very useful in our efforts to improve the situation.

We've been trying to clean things out a bit, but we start to feel overwhelmed by the task and end up not getting very far in our efforts. Recently though, we've started just trying to do one area or one type of item rather than an entire room, and we've had more success in this fashion. We also seem to do better when we tackle an area together, and luckily we tend to reinforce each other to get rid of more stuff, rather than encouraging our inner pack rats. So far we've weeded through books, dumped a ton of stuff from under the sink in our bathroom, and today we started in on our closet. We pulled out an embarrassing amount of clothing and other assorted things, which all now need to go to the dump or to Goodwill. We're not quite done in the closet, but we're definitely on the home stretch. I still probably (definitely!) have more clothes than I need hanging in there, but it is pared down... and I also got all my maternity clothes put away and brought out my in-between clothes. It is an improvement and a jump in the right direction!

Now the big struggle is to do the next step... getting the things out of the garage and to the appropriate places! I have a feeling we'll end up clearing out the house, and in the process our garage will be packed with everything we've removed. I suppose that so long as we eventually (and sooner rather than later!) tackle the garage it doesn't really matter too much.