Ephemera

When we decided to end renting and start buying and moving, it seemed appropriate to clear out junk. Like get rid of stuff. Lots of stuff. 15 years of stuff accumulated and acquiring space in garage and cupboards around Malvern East.

This Easter Weekend has seen us crescendo in our waste disposal. Over the past seven months, the following items have been disposed of, as thoughtfully as possible:

Sep 2009: Two hard drives, two monitors, one television, 5 large garbage bags of my clothes, several broken computer parts including video cards, used dvds and cds, a zip drive (remember them with the extra large diskettes), 3.5 inch diskettes, 5.25 inch diskettes, reams and reams of paper used for financial purposes. Bottles of alcohol. Glassware. Shot glasses. Spare pram. Two broken oil heaters.

Jan 2010 to April 2010: A glass table on wheels. Spare cups and saucers. Serving dishes. A vaccuum cleaner. Nearly 100 cricket and other books. Nearly 60 LPs. 30 DVDs. Another 2 large bags of my clothes. A printer. Another hard drive. A keyboard. A Sony PSP. Several old mobile phones that were no longer working. A joystick. More dishes. A cot, a bouncy net, a baby pouch (#3), baby clothes.

The point of bosworthing this down in a blog is to highlight the pointlessness of so many of these purchases. Once they were in the house and accumulating space and not being used, it became - oh we can use for second child, or I'll get it fixed and we can use it again or you'll never know when you'll need a third baby pouch/my cousin in India might use it/ we can send it to so and so. All lies. We never used any of these things again, ever.

ANd yet, despite throwing out more than 300 kg of junk, we still have more junk to get rid of! I feel like the house is more or less sorted (still arguing over various bits - milk shake maker, slow cooker, coffee table), there's a whole garage full of junk to get rid of. How to rid one's self of a foxtel dish? Technically, Foxtel can ask for it back, but they never do, yet it remains their property!

Hardwaste collection hunters will be pleasantly surprised when they walk past our frontage in the next few weeks!