Cleaning Out

This is our bathroom closet AFTER I cleaned it out

I wish, quite frequently, that I didn't have so much stuff. When I moved to Seattle I moved all of my possessions down in my little Mazda Protege (and it wasn't even full!). Of course, I had no furniture at that point. Now we have a three bedroom house, a garage, and a shed full of stuff. Every couple of months we go through our belongings and make a pile to take to Good Will. The fact that we can do that so often means we have too much of something! There are some things we will always have a lot of like hardwood furniture handmade by my father-in-law, outdoor gear (both for recreation and work), tools, and kitchen stuff. I'm fine with that - we use all of those things. It's the other stuff that so easily gets out of control - clothes, shoes, books, and then all the little tiny things that just pile up like pens, sticky notes, toiletries, hair ties, etc. These are exactly the things I don't want to be scrambling to throw in some random box just so I can unpack them when we move this summer. I don't need to ship six half-empty bottles of sunscreen to Alaska. I probably won't even need sunscreen in Alaska.

Ryan and I have been on a rampage weeding out our belongings since we got back from Florida. Today I tackled the bathroom first. Our bathroom has a closet. It's sort of handy, but it's also a place where toiletries have piled up for the last three and a half years. Would you believe that the photo above is after I threw away about half of what was there?!? Ridiculous, right? Especially considering the only "products" I actually need are these:

I have a feeling I'll be throwing the rest of that stuff away in about six months...