Organizing Again

It’s amazing how only 2 people can generate so much unused stuff in a house in such a short time. I started doing a bit of organizing of kitchen drawers this weekend, which led to the hall closet and I was just amazed at how quickly we can accumulate junk. Of course, a lot of it has to do with Kathy’s mom visiting yard sales and loading Kathy down every time she visits. I know when she finds these treasures that it makes sense to buy them, since they are dirt cheap and in good shape, but they mostly just fill up space and are thrown away in 6 months.

Let’s see, in the kitchen drawer were 3 to 4 pair of scissors, at least 15 to 20 pens (some no longer working, of course), 2 magnifying glasses, keys that have no known locks to turn (and yet we’re afraid to throw them away), 4 bic lighters, 3 nite-lights, 1 multi-plug, 100 push pins (an estimate), various tools and other miscellaneous things which have no known purpose (like the cover to some remote or toy). So, I put the tools in a box in the closet; put the pens in one tray and the scissors in another; put the other stuff in their appropriately names plastic bins in the hall closet, which led to it being re-organized.

In the closet, I cannot even begin to count the number of drug bottles and tubes that were thrown away because they had expired. I re-organized all the drawers so that the band-aids were stored with their brothers and sisters and not off in the ointment neighborhood (they do not get along). I also discovered lots of motel soap and shampoo that were canned, along with ointments that had a checkered past.

After we were done we had lots of open space left and were both amazed at how nice it looked. Everything is now stored with other relatives and all the plastic containers are nicely labeled. So, if we’re looking for ear plugs we will look in the “eye, ears, nose” box instead of finding them in the “extension cords” box.

I’m posting this because I’m sure we’ll go through the same routine around July of this year and find that the closet has coughed up a whole new batch of useless stuff which we’ll throw away.