Beginnings and ends always make me feel nostalgic. And you can find one just about anywhere. Last Friday was the last day of September, the last weekday of that week. That Saturday was the first day of October, the first day of the weekend. This coming weekend, three years ago, was also the date that Jason and I packed up our lives in Minnesota and hit the open road for Denver. In that three years, we've lived in three apartments and one condo, which is where we currently are. Lots of beginnings and ends. And in that time of moving homes, packing and unpacking everything we own and making it a home, I discovered I still have quite a bit of stuff. Baggage perhaps from a past life. Whatever you want to call it. When we moved, we rented the largest truck at U-haul that didn't require a commercial driver's license to operate. And we filled it - to the door, to the walls and to the ceiling. With our stuff. And that wasn't even the half of it. I sold the other half of my stuff in the few months prior. Now that we're in a place of our own, that we own, we're starting to feel like we can make it our own. The only problem? Our closets were still bursting with...my stuff! Mostly clothes to be exact. And they HAD to go. I was ready. Somehow I had carried them with me for, well, the past, ten years (or more!) Some still with tags on, some that didn't fit. Others that were just worn out or out of style. Or both! I recruited two friends whom I knew would be honest with me. We picked a date, created an strategy and set out to purge. Our initial agreed upon strategy:
So what actually happened? We ended up doing two closets in one day and at our original hour for each, you'd think that was possible. Well, it was but. Mine took a little less than three hours. And there was commentary. Oh, there was commentary. The end result: I had half of my original wardrobe remaining. Yep, HALF! And it felt great. It felt better than it did worse. In fact, it didn't feel bad at all. You hang on to all of it because you think you need it or that you'd be wasting it if you got rid of it and you won't have enough. My the reality is that I really do only wear about one quarter of what was really in there. So now I spend less time sifting through my clothes looking for the ones I usually wear anyway. Most of the other half I purged went to consignment. I took it all to one store first and what didn't go I took to another. What didn't go from there I intentionally took to a local store to donate. Thanks to the following merchants who I was referred to for my clothes' next life:
Update: I checked in today at Rags to see how I did in terms of return. I walked out with a $150 in less than five minutes. Yes, I realize that's a fraction of the original cost of what I brought in, but, it was SOMETHING. And I wasn't wasting time deliberating over those clothes anymore. They weren't taking up space in my mind and my closet. GONE. Old Town Exchange - I'll be in that neck of the woods tomorrow. And that's just it. The return on investment in the long run is clearing the mental and physical interference that can be created with physical stuff. To allow room for the important stuff. The real stuff.
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