2008 in 2008

My New Year's resolution. We have entirely too much stuff! I belong to a mom's forum (MDC) and there are a ton of different discussion boards- one being a simplifying and decluttering forum. Someone came up with a challenge- to get rid of 2008 things in the year 2008. So I signed up. I wasn't sure how I would keep track of everything, until Brian volunteered to make me a chart.
This week we went through the boys room- they really like it when we go through their room and clear things out. They normally have a hard time figuring out what to hang on to, but if their room is messy they usually ask if we can clear it out. We emptied their whole room and put it all in the living room:

How is it possible that that much junk was in that small of a room??
This time they asked if they could limit it to keeping 10 things each. Fine with me! Only the catch was weapons and stuffed animals didn't count... I guess. (We've never counted sets of toys- like legos or baseball cards)


Jesse had "The World's Smallest Pencil" and really didn't want to keep it as one of his 10, so he took a picture of it to prove how small it was and then tossed with it the rest of the stuff.



Stephen wanted a picture of a candy cane before he got rid of it-- here we are about 1/2 way through the stuff.

In the end we probably got rid of 400-500 things, we lost count after hitting 200 in one garbage bag. We threw out 4 bags of trash school papers, (I thought I went through them all... but they would stash them away!) broken toys missing pieces, etc. 4 bags of stuff went to the Rescue Mission and 4 bags of winter clothes went downstairs. I'll go through those later.

I just estimated on my chart- and it was a low estimate, I went with a little over 300 items. So now, on my chart I have 1470 things gone! And it hasn't made a huge difference, so I think I'm going to have to do it next year too!

Now for the last couple days they have been in their room sorting legos and building new things- because they like being in their room again!