Purging

In Denver these days they take away your regular garbage bin every week, your recycling bin every two weeks, and large items and extra garbage several times a year. All three come early in the morning (i.e. about 7 a.m.) tomorrow morning.

This time around, the pent up large item and extra garbage collection demand was high in our household. 

An old wooden plank cover that predated our move into our home more than twenty years ago for our gas meter was destroyed and had to be removed when a duplex neighbor whose main gas line comes from a meter in front of our half had a gas leak (we were otherwise spared).

A while ago we discovered that bugs had eaten away two decent sized area rugs. The bugs are gone, but the rugs had to go too.

Also we returned to empty nest status as kids moved out in June and in late August. The kids took some items from their rooms and the kitchen with them. And they left behind to be disposed of, some too destroyed to donate bed pads, an old file cabinet that was falling apart, and some boxes for items that had been too large to break down and put in our recycling, which all had to go.

Add to that a campaign led by my wife to round up items that could be donated to Goodwill (a mix of clothes, left over items from promotions that ended long ago, a few books from college she no longer wanted, a puzzles we'd grown bored of after using them as much as we would during the pandemic, and a few miscellaneous items), as well as a never assembled bookcase that we found a new home for with someone else.

Collectively, the result was a very substantial purge of stuff in a condensed three day period. This comes on top of a sustained effort for the past few weeks to use up excessive inventories of grocery store items that made sense in a household with four adults, but not so much in a household with two.

The end result has been that our small home has quite a bit less stuff in it. For what it is worth, we've also made modest progress in clearing out excess things in my storage unit over the last year or so in several rounds of purging.

Working in probate, I've seen plenty of homes where this never happened, and where home owners basically left their home exactly as it was when they bought it as young adults about to have children, except that they continually added more stuff. 

We've fixed things as they break, updated the place enough to keep it reasonably modern. This year, for example, our huge fussy 1925 coal fired steam heat boiler converted to natural gas on an ad hoc basis sometime later by a previous homeowner, finally had to be replaced with a new purpose built gas fired steam heat boiler that takes less manual attention, doesn't require spare parts with asbestos, and takes up about 1/6th of the space of the old one.

We gotten rid of many things we no longer need as well (although I mount an evergreen campaign to explain why books and files need to be kept, even when you don't use them every year, unlike most other things). 

We certainly aren't a paragon of excellence in these respects, but our home won't be the nightmare that so many homes are when we pass, or when we have to downsize for health or other reasons, either.