Week 34 - de-clutter your home



several of the 23 boxes of books we collected

       The actual title of this week's adventure was "de-clutter your home by selling stuff on eBay."  Not quite ready for that yet - AND - I have never sold anything on eBay before, so I would have to learn how to do that.

     This whole idea started with my mother.  She has a lot of books in her house taking up space.  Books in the living room, dining room, bedroom, and in the rooms upstairs, which she basically doesn't use right now.  So I had the idea that we would spend an afternoon and go through all her books and take the ones she didn't want anymore to Good Will or someplace.  Well, we worked all afternoon and didn't even get to the books in her upstairs.  We organized her Danielle Steele collection.  I think Mom has every book she has written.  We packed up about 250 books in boxes and I put them in my car and drove them back to Charleston.  I had Bill unload them and put them in a spare bedroom.  Even though we de-cluttered my mother's home, I managed to CLUTTER my own home. 



1923 copyright date



     My next big idea was to go through all the books we had in our house and add them to my mother's books and then donate them to the library.  I do most of my reading now on a Kindle and didn't realize how many books we had around the house.  We gathered books from all the bookshelves in all the bedrooms and from the storage places I found to put all of our kids' language books:  Russian, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Hungarian.  Then we started downstairs in the family room.  We have three built-in floor to ceiling book shelves and, believe me, I had taken advantage of that space throughout the years!!  After boxing up our own books, we decided to count them and came up with 333 books.  Bill called the Charleston Public Library and they were so excited to accept the books.  They said they accept books at any time and when they get enough, they have a book sale.  They just won't accept text books or encyclopedias, so we had to throw those out.



     I saved alot of books that I particularly liked and thought I might re-read.  I could never give away a Stephen King book and also saved all my Dean Koontz books.  And I could never part with the Harry Potter series or the Lord of the Rings books.  Bill kept some sport books - mostly about Cubs and Bears.  We also have lots and lots of children's books, most from when David, Heather and Patrick were small, but some from when Bill and I were children.  I am sure those are antiques by now.



       At my mother's house I found a book in a series called The Honey Bunch Books.  I remember the Bobbsey Twins books, but not the Honey Bunch books.  I guess I'll have to read one to see what kind of an "excellect adventure" Honey Bunch can have.