Since writing my post about Hoarding I have done a huge amount of ruthless clearing out, be it selling stuff on Facebook, donating items to the local Red Cross shop, taking things to the tip and filling our recycling wheelie bin.

Amazingly someone bought all the foam from our old sofa!  Also the oil pastels, some acrylic yarn, a chair, a collection of rubber stamps and pending collection a massager and basket making supplies have been sold!

I’ve given away some poly/cotton thread reels and upholstery fabric.

I donated a huge suitcase, that was filled with bags of office clothes, summer clothes, clothes too small for me, coats, shoes, handbags.  Plus some office equipment and drawing pads and coloured pencils and all sorts of random home office items.

I’ve thrown out broken picture frames and lots and lots of ‘memorabilia’.  I had every handwritten letter I have ever received, many of which were from penpals I don’t even remember!  Every Valentine’s card I’d ever received!  Every school report!  My first pair of ballet point shoes!  Old watercolour paintings I’d done that were really poor.  Old calendars I’d kept to paint the pictures on them.  So much stuff!

I have kept letters from my dad, my friends Elaine and Annie and my one and only letter from my childhood bestfriend Stephen. Everything else went in the recycling bin.  Only my ballet shoes did I keep thinking about retrieving from the bin, but when the bin men came this week I watched them and other random junk disappear for good.

This week I have some kitchen gadgets and games to sell.

Here’s some of the envelopes from my friend Elaine from 1991/92 when I was an au pair in Michigan…you can see why I kept these!

Goodness knows what the postman (or rather mail man) thought!!!!

My crafting cupboard has everything at easy reach and without having to take anything out to get to something else, that’s a huge difference to the mountain of stuff that was previously balancing in there.  There’s still more to go through but I’m getting there.

Emotionally I feel okay about the clear out, but it’s hard to tell really because I have a much more stressful thing going on at the moment that is perhaps overshadowing any feelings about the clearout.  I don’t think I am going to regret anything I have got rid of and hopefully I haven’t just contributed to other crafters’ hoards lol!

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