Purging T-minus 518 days: Board Games & Outside Toy Purge

Another week and more trash cans filled as we continue to purge.

We have twenty-five years worth of board games. The best solution is to just take the board games and toss them all into the trash. No one wants board games... maybe we'll get a quarter for a game at a yard sale. Regardless, it is difficult to take all these games with all the grand memories and throw them away, what an incredible waste! Instead of throwing them away, we decided to find all the missing pieces, assemble the games, and put them into rummage totes. We spent many hours looking for all those tiny cherries for Hi-Ho Cherries, and all the other game pieces to make games whole. I know it is a complete waste of time... but it feels like it is the right thing to do.

We have complete sets of various toys. My wife would like to sell them in Ebay or some other online site. I think that is a huge waste of time and just want to get rid of it. Neither of us have time for that. But maybe our adult daughter would be willing to sell some stuff in exchange for a cut of the sale. We decided to talk with her about this in a couple of weeks.

Once we had done as much as we could with the games, we went to a store room in our basement. The storeroom is lined with wooden shelves containing odds and ends: outside Christmas decorations we haven't used in years, snow sleds designed for children, volleyball nets, baby toys, and more. As we stood looking at all these treasures, we realized we didn't want any of it. We hung a sign on every shelf "Rummage items".

Next, we purged the "outside toys" totes. These totes have balls, Frisbee, and various items used during the summer for playing outdoors. We decided to save many of the items for our dog to play with and tare apart this coming summer, the rest went to the rummage shelves in the store room.

Then we went to the Beach and Pool totes. These totes had buckets and shovels from when the kids were young, and a bunch of pool floats from our many trips to Florida. Pool floats are cheap, so, we decided to donate everything and buy new floats when we move to Florida.

Our adult daughter has a lot of items stored at our house. She stopped by for a few hours to go through several of her totes and reduced things down.

The good news? We filled another two trash cans (could have used a third). Out of 250 totes, we now have 30 empty totes. We have five totes in the rummage pile, and most of the store room is all rummage.

We have a long ways yet to go. 190 totes remain, all the closets and cupboards, the draws, and everything else. But we made good headway!