Trying to organize too much stuff.

Just so you all know, I have too much stuff.

Today I've been trying to sort through the last of the boxes from my basement. No, I'm not cleaning out my basement for the party. It's an unfinished room that's more like a cave than a room. But I am trying to get all our winter clothes washed and put in boxes so that they aren't cluttering up the house. In Kentucky spring comes suddenly, then winter comes back suddenly, then spring again, then winter, then summer. The weather doesn't gradually get warmer each day. That would be too easy. Instead the highs will be in the 40's one day, the 70's the next, then 3 days in the 30's, then back to the upper 60's, then 30's again, until one morning three weeks after this all began when you wake up and it's about 29 degrees out... and an hour later it's in the upper 80's and spring is basically over.

I think (though I can't make any guarantees here) that we've finally moved past the zigzag of spring and have settled on really hot. So now I put up all the winter clothes that we were still using as of 3 days ago and hope that I don't have to pull them back out next week. I need to get them out of the way. When you have to keep changing clothes because the afternoon is 30 or 40 degrees hotter than the morning, you end up with a lot of dirty laudry. And when you have 6 people in your family changing clothes twice a day you end up with clothes everywhere.

So... Zaven and Caly's clothes are being boxed up and put in the basement in case they still fit next winter. If they don't, I'll go back through them in the winter to see what's worth saving for Zoe and Quinn to grow into. I don't have space to save it all, and besides some of it will be out of style. But jeans and t-shirts never go out of style. Quinn and Zoe's winter clothes are being bagged up and delivered to Goodwill. A few of the really nice stuff I will keep to sell on ebay or to save for my grandkids. Don't laugh! Zaven is 16 in a month. There's a chance that before Quinn grows into the clothes Zaven just outgrew, my as-yet-non-existant grand baby will be wearing some of the clothes Quinn just outgrew. Besides, toddler clothes take up a lot less space than a teenager's do. I'm also sorting through Scott's and mine, of course. We won't be growing (I hope!) but some of it is worn out and I'll donate that. Goodwill has a contract with another company to recycle the clothes that aren't in good enough condition to sell. They turn them into insullation. Pretty cool, isn't it?

The stuff I'm keeping is boxed in plastic boxes (because my unfinished basement floods) and the boxes are numbered. I keep an inventory on my computer so that when I need to find the Girls Winter size 6X, I can pull up the list and know to look in box number 4. The problem is that I actually have to organize the stuff when I put them away. For 6 people it's a lot of boxes. And I kind of need everything clean and folded and ready to go into the boxes all at once or I end up going up and down the stairs to add a pair of pants that was in the dirty laundry or a sweater that was under the bed. Or even worse, I don't bother going up and down and just have 3 or 5 boxes that are just labeled "stuff". My big plan was to get it all done this weekend.

My problem? The weather didn't cooperate. I don't have the A/C in the window yet so the house is hot. I did NOT want to put on the dryer, too. But it rained all day. So I didn't get any laundry done. And that means I have stuff that didn't get put away.

But, I did get a lot of it done. A whole lot. I feel good about it. My house is looking ever so much cleaner.

And I also discovered that I'll have a few empty boxes left over. I plan on filling them up with all my freebie shampoos and lotions. I have a small stockpile that I'll be using to make Christmas baskets for my mom and my MIL. They both loved their mother's day baskets and by Christmas most of their stuff should be used up. It makes a really, really nice present. And even though they both know I didn't pay full price for these things, they love that I carefully pick products specifically for them. My mom loves the organic products and loves that I choose things that are unscented for her. My MIL loves that I pick products with her health in mind. She was so excited to get low-dose enteric aspirin because the aspirin she'd been taking bothered her stomach. So even though I didn't pay for those things, they still show consideration and effort.