T-Minus 484 Days: Purging Toys

My children are ages 16, 20, and 26. What that means is we have been buying toys for 26 years, and the kids are too old to play with any toys. We have donated many of the toys of the years, but we have kept some of the best sets. For example, we have a ton of Little People. We have a large pile of Rescue Heroes. And, we have more legos that any human should be allowed to have.

When the kids grew out of a toy and there was no one to hand it down to, we packed the toys into a tote and cataloged the tote into our 270 tote "Tub City".  Fifty of those totes contained toys: books, board games, dolls, action figures, race car tracks, trains, match box car, tonka trucks, and just about anything else you can imagine!

We already went through all of the kids books and board games and purged those. This weekend, we went after many of the remaining toy totes. Our goals were:

1. Make sure each tote contained what the inventory said it contained.
2. Complete sets were all put together into one tote (not spread around several).
3. Make sure everything was cleaned and ready for sale.
4. Skip all the totes containing barbies or stuffed animals

We didn't have the emotional connection to the toys like we did the clothes and the art work, so, it was very easy to go through them. I came across many old toys I had when I was a kid and had given to my kids. The toys are now antiques!

It took hours to accomplish these goals, but we did it! We took half a dozen totes and sent them directly to the rummage pile. The rest? We need to sort through and purge.

We have now went through 52% of the totes! 27% of our totes are sitting empty.