A Basement Stuff-ectomy

As usual, I'm tired.  It comes with the territory.  By the time I get this post done it will read like a work of (the late) Hunter S. Thompson.

And I don't mean that as a compliment.

I couldn't decide what to write about.  My son has his usual words of wisdom; many elephants in the room were addressed at the (brain tumor) support group meeting tonight.

But what I've been thinking about for the last week  is stuff--as in too much of it.

I wrote in a previous post how a former classmate of mine reduced his personal possessions to less than 500.  As we've been assessing the damage of last week's plumbing disaster, it has occurred to me that we have 500 things just in boxes in the basement, including, but not limited to the following:

work my son has done in his elementary school career;

A box of work supplies I used at a previous job;

yearbooks dating back to the Stone Age;

pictures also dating back that far; 

countless boxes of who knows how many model trains (a hobby of my husbands);and

a bed

We are going to try to create a storage area  out of our crawl space, like our neighbors did, by paving a flat surface in the space, and storing what will fit. Whatever we do, we will need to move these things somewhere, because our insurance adjuster said we will need to replace our carpet, and linoleum in the basement. 

Kind of hard to do, with trains, boxes and books in the way. 

It's too bad it took sewage in the basement to force us to do what my husband calls a "stuff-ectomy", but maybe this is the start of a downsizing trend.

Then again, we haven't given anything away, yet.