Keep, Donate, Toss

It was cleaner day today here at my house, the day I have to keep myself out from under Sherri's feet. Maggie always retreats to my bedroom for a nap and I usually go out to do errands, but today I didn't. I confined myself to the craft room for the day instead - not to do crafts, but to bring order to the chaos of my craft supplies. I had made a start on that this week, but today I was going for broke..... or had intentions to do so.

I started out well and emptied the whole sideboard of watercolour painting and sketching supplies, moved some items to another storage spot and reorganized the rest to create a very tidy storage cabinet.

I spent some time in the process looking through my painting portfolios and all my "unfinished paintings" and through the box of photos, postcards and magazine pages of things I might want to paint.....and then put them very carefully back into the reorganized and very tidy cabinet.

Kept everything. Just in case.

Then I tackled the card-making shelves, baskets and drawers, rearranged items into more compact storage containers and managed to empty some more boxes..that I will keep to house those photos I have removed from those old photo albums.  

Donated some embossing powders and stickers.

Then, despite knowing better, I tackled the memorabilia containers, where I found my old scrapbooks about home decor and kitchen renovation ideas.( see above). Of course that meant browsing through them all and marvelling at what had appealed to me back then and what still does! It also reminded me that I had never followed through on that kitchen reno idea..and that I should have! My kitchen is in dire need of a renovation and I just don't have the energy now at my age to plan and implement one!  It guess it is one of those things that one should do when one can - when one is young with boundless energy and patience. 

Toss or Keep? Undecided - which does not bode well.. 

I also found a whole bunch of letters that I had written to my parents  back when they spent their winers in AZ and I was home here working. Well of course I had to read through them....and in doing so, I relived some work experiences that I had survived and again, marvelled at the energy level and stamina it took for me to do that job!   

Kept the letters.

So, a whole day passed and what I ended up with was a very tidy painting storage cabinet. 

I I must be more ruthless.