Thank you Ruth!

The lovely thing about spending a whole week with my cousins (well,, one of many, many lovely things) is that we have time to do more than catch up with the latest news. A couple of the cousins are redecorating and renovating their homes and we got onto talking about various plans. She was planning to redecorate her home, our main focus must be to get rid of the mountains of extra stuff we have. Too many books, too many clothes (brought up not to be wasteful!) too many kitchen items (gathered over the years, plus things form our parents’ homes) too much art stuff from one of us, too many notebooks and writing implements from the other… etc. Our inherited mantra has always been don’t waste, “it” might come in useful, we might one day “need” it. It was the way we were brought up, in families that weren’t affluent, and where incomes weren’t huge.

My cousin agreed about “stuff” and said she tried to get rid of one thing every day – it might be a saucepan, a pair of pillowslips, an item which doesn’t work which she clung onto in case it could ever be mended (it never will be, and anyway, she doesn’t need it any more, a jumper which doesn’t fit, a spare something or another, a biro which has run out of ink, a picture/ornament she doesn’t like, it could be anything – but she would sell it/bin it/recycle it/donate it! She suggested (challenged) me to do the same, and I have accepted the challenge.

• Friday – soup maker which always catches and burns on the bottom – to the small electrical items bin at the municipal tip
• Saturday – very proud to have gone through one of the kitchen cupboards and got rid of much more than one thing, including measuring cups, jugs, bowls, flasks and a cafetiere
• Sunday – items from the airing cupboard, including brand new pillowslips which are too small for our pillows (so why had I kept them?)
• Monday –  two books I know I will never read (there are many, many, many more, but I have to start somewhere!)
• Tuesday – a DVD set I bought my husband but which he had no interest in, had never watched, and forgotten we had
• Wednesday – a jumper I bought but didn’t like (which I could have put up with but it also didn’t fit)
• Thursday – wooden spoons (we had over thirty but it still made me sad!)
• today, Friday – mystery items from the freezer, I think they were roast potatoes but  not entirely sure

Thank you Ruth, for your encouragement and suggestion!!

My featured image is of a cheeky chappy from a junk shop which I DIDN’T buy! If I had, would he be returning to a second-hand shop now? Probably not!