Thursday: Decluttering

As I do not go back to my archives work until next Monday, we decided that a free week would be a good opportunity to declutter our garage, which had got seriously out of hand - the downside of living in the same house for nearly 30 years and raising three children here is that we have accumulated Too Much Stuff. A lot of the Stuff had ended up in the garage which had become  a dumping ground for anything that didn't have anywhere else to go. 

The plan was that H and I would do the sorting and organising, and that M would be in charge of disposal and take the evicted Stuff either to a charity shop or to the rubbish tip / recycling centre as appropriate. The plan worked well. H was ruthless over what to keep and what to chuck and stopped me holding on to things I didn't need but was inexplicably reluctant to get rid of. M managed to sweet talk three charity shops into taking two car loads of Stuff between them - during lockdown lots of people decluttered then held on to Stuff until the charity shops reopened so they have been swamped, and as they have to quarantine anything coming in their capacity to take items is limited. I was probably the weak link of the three of us, but H and M kept me on task! There is still a mountain of junk waiting to go to the tip tomorrow, and we can't do the final tidying and organising until that is gone, so I can't post before and after photos yet. Oh, and there are a few items which we need to try to freecycle.

Today has been the first day of what is forecast to be a two-day heatwave, so I spent much of it outdoors in the garden. After all the decluttering I feel fully justified in being lazy for the last couple of days of my time off work. I did start the day with an exercise session and finished it with a three mile walk - we met R and her dog for a walk round the Duke of Bedford's deer park. We saw quite a lot of deer, including some stags who were bellowing loudly. We also broke the dog, who was exhausted by the end of the walk with hardly enough energy to jump into the car. Even his tail was tired.