We got serious about this de-clutter thing and got busy in the Florida Room and the garage, yesterday. But first, we hit The 43rd St Deli (on 13th) for breakfast where I had – gasp – oatmeal. Steele cut oatmeal, pan-seared w/a balsamic vinegar reduction sauce topped with bananas and dried berries (and walnuts too but I picked around those, yuk.) And that pan seared oatmeal – really good. (Do not tell anyone from my “old life” that I ate oatmeal!) (Also, the photo is from the iPhone so not great and I don’t have time to do any editing and photoshopping, sorry.)
Anyway, the clean up. Crazy.
Really crazy since much of what we were de-cluttering had BEEN de-cluttered a few years ago and we broke the biggest de-clutter rule of all… when something is set aside to leave your house, it needs to LEAVE YOUR HOUSE! Bags of old kid clothes, old toys, stuffed animals and just plain JUNK that should have been gone were still there. ugh.
Every car driving through the neighborhood stopped to take stuff from the curb. Many people got out, walked up the driveway and sifted through the piles of stuff. Many, many more people wandered into the garage and attempted to remove items before we’d sorted through them. Many, many people wanted things we were not planning on parting with. I surprised TW by saying I was ready to let the “grandma headboard” and the “grandma radio” go. (The headboard is at the curb, come get it! It’s orange! The radio was sold and the nice man is coming to get it tomorrow.)
We found some other stuff, well a lot of other stuff. But this is the stuff that I was most amused by and can actually share here…
Yes, that’s a record of Nazi marches and speeches. Yes, that’s a flash cube. Yes, that’s an Atari tape cartridge. Yes, those are dressmaker’s matches.
Oh, the skink… it was dead and I did not kill it.
It’s so much fun to de-clutter, because it feels so very freeing afterwards! (I must admit I’m wondering why you have such random items in your garage, though!)
That oatmeal sounds delicious! I eat boring, plain oatmeal (which I happen to like, so it’s okay) on a regular basis, but I’ve never had it all “fancy,” like the kind you mentioned. Yummy!
Denise, it’s your blog and you can obviously publish whatever you want in it… but Nazi-anything is SO sensitive to so many people. Trust me on this one: my grandparents are holocaust survivors. It may be funny that you have that “startling, shocking” evidence of “Hitler’s inferno” in your garage but to many people, nothing can be even remotely funny about the holocaust. Please feel free to tell me to shut up, that it’s none of my business and that I’m being oversensitive, but I just needed to say that.
That grandma radio is a piece of history… I wish I were in Florida, I would have bought it from you. 🙂
Oh, I have MAJOR guilt. You are like the third person who has posted something about organizing their garage and cleaning out the clutter. CRAP! I have needed to do that for so long….I’m ashamed. Every time I try to start, I do a couple of things and stop….it’s too overwhelming. I have a storage room in the basement with the same problem.
I’m going to pat you on the back Denise….you deserve it. It always feels so good to get that stuff done. Hey, looking at the ‘big picture,’ I guess it had to be done sometime, huh?
Awww, the grandma radio and the grandma headboard are gone? Please tell me somebody took the headboard and it didn’t just get carted off to the landfill?….somebody did take it didn’t they?
I want the steele cut oatmeal. It looks “yummy” as Riley would say.