There’s a quote I picked up from someone, somewhere, years ago – “You want to know the state of my mind? Take a look at the state of my house”.

The move of our household from rented flat in the inner city to 3bedroom/large block in the boondocks is complete. But the transition of goods from Point A to Point B was only one battle. The war proper looks to be a long one, entrenched even. Our common enemy? STUFF.

We used to joke at the old flat that we had “3 bedrooms worth of stuff in a 2 bedroom flat”. Having moved said STUFF into an actual 3 bedroom house, I think I can safely say we underestimated our amount of STUFF.

In many partnerships, nature seems to hook folk up with roughly equilibrium-sustaining attitudes to STUFF. One often sees partnerships where one party is the “That’ll come in handy one day, can’t throw that out!” voice and the other party is the “Hope you’ve finished reading that ‘cos it’s recycling night tonight!”. Something went wrong with this equilibrium in our partnership.

We’re both packrats. The amount of empty boxes we possess, alone, is matter for concern. (They’re nice boxes, okay? Some are just really nifty design or others look too useful or more again we think we’ll need to re-pack things into when moving. You can see where the potential for serious hoarderism is a worry.)

So. We’re moved in. But we accept the fact that we need to pare down the sheer amount of STUFF we own. This means sorting through everything -everything!- and deciding on what to purge. It’s a daunting task, one that I started with a little motivation and more than a little over-optimism. One that I now just find myself bogged down in (entrenched, even).

Here’s one of the problems – sorting a large amount of STUFF requires space in which to do the sorting. But we currently don’t have that amount of space. Can you guess why? Yup. Because it’s full of STUFF that needs to be sorted.

This cycle is vicious.