In the seemingly never ending task of reducing our belongings in advance of our cross country move (Hubby retires in 21 months), I have been trying out the Konmari method of deciding what to keep.
My clothes were easy as they have had a lot of attention this year. My books - same deal. Then I got to papers excluding sentimental ones which are mostly my genealogical files. I thought this would be a breeze as at the beginning of each January I go through all of our files and remove unnecessary paper. Well, clearly I thought I was doing that!
It turns out I haven't really looked at each piece of paper but rather whizzed through each file. I'm almost done with the looking at each piece this round though.
What's left? I still need to go through our fire safe, a notebook of mine and our kitchen desk pile. But this morning Hubby asked what he should do with all of the papers in his office at work that represent his lifetime career achievement!!! I suggested scanning them and tossing. Hopefully he has multi-page scanning capability at work as our combo printer/scanner/fax will only do one page per file. I'd buy a new scanner rather than moving and storing all of his papers which will probably rarely, if ever, be looked at again.
Onward with papers I can deal with.
I have a whole file cabinet to go through. My hubby brought tons of stuff home when he cleaned out his office...still sitting here in a box.
ReplyDeleteI feel for you! I don't want my husband to lose his published research but don't want lots more paper at home either. Scanning is the way to go I think.
DeleteI have two boxes of papers from work that have been sitting in the basement for almost ten years. Haven't looked at them. They mean nothing to me now. Throw the stuff out!
ReplyDeleteTime to let them go Tom, LOL. That is what tends to happen to old work materials but they represent so much work and skill on our part that it is hard to initially part with them.
DeleteI am so impressed about the hard work you throw into this, Juhli! You'll be so happy about it :-)
ReplyDeleteThanks Mette. Moving across the country after living in the same house for 20 years will be expensive and quite a project. I'm excited about the end result but trying to minimize the challenges in the process.
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