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It started with the garage, and that was only because stuff was starting to pile inward, encroaching from either side and forcing us to either park closer to each other (and thus cause me to whine about how he didn’t give me enough room in the garage), or forcing us to park right next to the stuff. This was no big deal for Richard, because he parks on the right, but for me, this meant smacking my car door into everything every time I opened it. So Saturday morning, after we returned from our bike ride to Starbucks, we tackled the garage. First, all the recyclable stuff went into Richard’s car (they don’t do curbside recycling pickup here, alas). While he ran off to drop everything off at the recycling center, I loaded up my car with all the things that have been piling for months in the far corner, needing to be donated. By the time he came back, I’d gotten most of it into my car and had begun the process of going through the rest of the miscellaneous clutter. Between the two of us, we threw out a bunch of things, loaded more stuff into the ‘donations’ pile, and organized the rest of it. When we came back from dropping all the donations off at Goodwill, we could both park easily, with plenty of space on the sides and in between. Flush from that victory, I marched upstairs and started in on the guest room. First we went through the few remaining boxes and figured out what to keep and what to put away. There really wasn't all that much stuff to sort through, so that went pretty quick, and what remains is simply to be moved into the attic the next time we feel inspired to drag the ladder into the house and move the litter boxes so one of us can climb through the hole in the closet ceiling to get them up there. Then it was time to do a little rearranging. When we built the bookshelves in the bedroom, the old shelf moved into the guest room and has been lurking there for weeks, waiting for this moment. Today I finally transferred all the books from the smaller shelves to the larger one. And with two smaller shelves cleared and suddenly available, Richard now has a new spot to store things on his side of the office, and I was able to move all my cookbooks out of the cupboard in the kitchen and into the dining room, which meant I could then move all the stuff on that kitchen counter into the now-empty cupboard and voila, suddenly there was a completely clear counter (which makes up for the fact that the other two counters are now covered in things I brought in from my car, which I finally cleaned out as well). I still need to rinse off all the plastic crates and drag them upstairs into the guest room so I can organize all the sewing stuff (which requires going *through* all the sewing stuff to begin with, and by the way there’s all that fabric I’m supposed to be turning into curtains for the office, yes I know), but the key thing here is that we are, finally, completely unpacked. Okay, so we've been in this house nearly a year now, but I'm still pretty proud of us anyway. Phew.
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