Purging T-minus 525 days: Christmas Decoration Purge

For whatever reason, the purging bug has hit us!

Every year after Thanksgiving, we transform our house into a Christmas wonderland. We love our Christmas decorations and have a lot of fun. We enjoy it so much, we never want to take the decorations down. Nevertheless, our goal is to take the decorations down by the end of January.

We decided that a first step to taking down the Christmas Decorations was to purge our decorations. We would get rid of anything we haven't used in years, consider getting rid of anything we didn't use this year, and question decorations as we put them away.

I have an entire tote of Christmas Lights where some of the bulbs are not working on the string. I have kept them in case I ever want to fix them, or, I need some spare bulbs. What I have been doing instead of messing with old Christmas Lights is to wait until the after-Christmas sales and buy a bunch of new strings at 75% off. As a result, I have several totes of new Christmas lights that can be used for future Christmases. So... why do I need a tote full of dead lights? Those went in the garbage.

Once we finished purging the Christmas items, we were struck by the purging bug and kept going. We have 250 totes in our tote store room (we call it Tote City). Every tote is numbered, inventoried, and categorized.

We created three piles: Totes to sort first. Totes to be donated. Totes for a rummage sale. We started collecting boxes and flattening them for moving. We also have a bunch of color stickers and we have been walking around putting stickers on things: Blue for rummage, red for donate, and yellow for keep.

At the end of the weekend, my wife and I sat on the couch completely overwhelmed. Our heads were swimming at the scope of all the work that needs to get done. My wife suggested we might need a dumpster, but those are very expensive. We decided, instead, to put an extra two trash cans to the curb each week until the trash collectors complain.

We decided that at some point, we are going to hire the trash collectors. They come to your house and you just point at things and they carry it out and put it in their truck. You then pay for how full the truck is. We'll use that for some of our large items when we get closer to the move.